So what does the aliasing sound like? Is it extra high end content, almost like a white noise layered into the sound?
I've noticed a fair amount of noise around some notes when picking very hard, it's like an over the top distortion "whoosh" sound. The Axe 3 does this as well, maybe to a lesser extent. I'll need to fire up my real amp and compare as well.
Imagine every time you played a Cmajor chord, right there in the distant background there is a bminor 17th chord at the same time. Imagine how shit it would read if you wrote that down in a score and asked 300 violinists to play it. Then Hannibal Lecter cuts your heart out right in front of your wife and kids as punishment. Then he eats it with a McDonald's milkshake; the vintage kind. Proper thick and fluffy, not the watered down shite they sell today.
That's what aliasing can potentially be.
<chatgpt takes over>
Your speakers start whispering secrets they were never supposed to know. Not in words — no, in flickers of ghostly harmonics and jittering transients, like the sound of a broken modem trying to summon the dead.
Each note you play becomes two, then four, then a crawling swarm of warped spectral imposters — glassy, sharp-edged frequencies that weren’t invited to the party but showed up drunk anyway. The further up the neck you go, the more they multiply, until your solo sounds like a metal scrapyard being sucked into a black hole.
Every time you play a note —
just one clean note — aliasing slips in like a hex, whispering backwards Latin through your signal chain. Not loud. Just enough for the dog to start growling at your amp. Just enough to make you wonder if it
really sounded like that when you recorded it.
You're on stage. The lights dim. The crowd roars. You hit that first glorious open C chord — and aliasing, that unholy glitch-ghoul, rides shotgun through your amp. It isn’t loud enough to notice at first, just a thin, metallic shimmer — like rusted tinsel on your tone. But it
spreads.
Your delay pedal, once lush and angelic, now repeats with a cold, robotic sneer. The reverb trails curl inward, souring into digital rot. Every harmonic above the 5th is no longer yours — they’ve been
possessed. The top end becomes a nest of broken glass and razorwire.
You crank your solo — finger poised for that searing high note. You strike — and instead of piercing the air like a war cry, it tears sideways, splitting into bent, dissonant shrieks that no one invited. The front row winces. Your drummer glares. You
feel it slip — not just pitch, but
soul.
You try to roll back the treble — too late. The PA system feeds back with a scream that seems to
know your childhood fear. The monitors speak in tongues. You swear you hear laughter through the mids.
Your in-ears lie to you. The crowd hears one version of your tone — shrill, chaotic, like a swarm of cursed circuit boards melting in real time. You're hearing another — hollow, haunted, like your guitar's ghost playing through a broken radio at the bottom of a well.
Your tone is gone. Your soul is forfeit. All because you didn’t lowpass at Nyquist and thought,
"Maybe I don’t need oversampling."
That’s aliasing in a live rig.
The devil on your pedalboard.
Smiling. Always smiling.
.
