Up all night was: guitar synth

[farky]

I just have to jump into this guitar-synth thread.  Disclaimer: I'm going 
to seem awful serious and wolf-like.

Are you guys sure you want the guitar synth to feel like a guitar?  Maybe 
what you want is infinitely fast tracking.  I can't imagine the nuances 
being electronically converted.  What does a pinch harmonic translate to 
synth-wise?  How about scraping your pick?  Do you want the weird pitches 
that come from a scrape to all be converted to pitches?  Let's say you 
transfer all the pickup vibrations into electrically useful data.  Will 
it be musical, even though it responds to every nuance?  

It seems like all the guitarists basically want an electronic guitar.  It 
also seems to them(us?)that the guitaristic cliches are important to 
preserve.  I want a synth that tracks pitch lightning fast and sounds 
absolutely nothing like a guitar.  I also want something that sounds 
absolutely unlike a synthesizer.  My observation is that the most 
successful synth-guitarists (belew, reid, fripp) don't care about the 
feel of the instrument being preserved but treat it as a new instrument.  
Belew doesn't give a crap about tracking.

It's been a really interesting thread because I'm currently building a 
guitar synth.  Should we have a separate site for this speculation or 
maybe a separate list?  Surely it could be filled with information.  And 
the  problems we've discussed will eventually be solved.

toby