Guitar synths (Don's rant)

[Scott Gravenhorst]

Well, dang, thank you Don.  This is what I've been mulling for
this thread; Don just nailed it so I'll do naught but simply
agree.  Any guitar synth I've seen has precious little in terms
of the controller aspect of expressivness necessary.  We're luck
to get pitch bend per string with current units, let alone all
of the harmonic controlling methods that guitarists use (as Don
aptly notes) without even thinking about it.



Don Tillman <don at till.com> wrote:
>   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
>
>

-- Scott Gravenhorst
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