Guitar synths (Don's rant)

[Don Tillman]

   Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 09:02:17 -0400
   From: Harry Bissell <harrybissell at prodigy.net>

   You don't need to move the frets to get V/oct response... just an antilog
   converter...  Guitars are already "expo" by nature...

Harry, Harry, Harry...  It's I/x, not exponential.  *Imgine* what the
fingerboard would look like if it were exponential!  :-)

----------------

I have a lot to say about the topic of guitar synths, many pages
worth, and I'll probably post an article about it on my web site some
time in the near future.  But for now... speaking as a guitarist,
keyboard player, sythesist, electrical engineer, synth builder and
music writer, I think this discussion is missing the point of a guitar
synthesizer.  Just as I think all the current guitar synth
manufacturers are missing the point.

For a guitarist, playing a particular note is not all that important.
All this work figuring out the note that's being fretted seems silly
when the guitarist himself typically doesn't know what note he's
playing.  What's important is how the note is played.

A guitar is a remarkably expressive instrument.  I can play a note in
a thousand different ways depending on pick position, pick angle, how
tightly I hold the pick, pick thickness, tapping, pulling off,
bending, reverse bending, use of harmonics, buzzes, palm muting, my
own personal variation of palm muting, use of feedback, and so forth.
Any guitar synth mechanism that can't go head-to-head with this sort
of expressibility is going to be toy.

What's needed is a way of transfering the guitarists natural modes of
expression, or something reasonably close, to a synthesizer. 

  -- Don

-- 
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California, USA
don at till.com
http://www.till.com