Up all night was: guitar synth

[Don Tillman]

   Date: Tue, 23 May 00 22:06:59 -0700
   From: farky <farky at ix.netcom.com>

My opinions...

   Are you guys sure you want the guitar synth to feel like a guitar? 

Roughly, yes.

   Maybe what you want is infinitely fast tracking. 

Yes, absolutely.  Do you accept a delay in any other instrument?
(Besides Carillon Bells?)

   I can't imagine the nuances being electronically converted.  
   What does a pinch harmonic translate to synth-wise?  
   How about scraping your pick?  

Anything that's got some potential musical use.  You make funny noises
on a guitar, you make funny noises on a synth; what's the issue?

   Do you want the weird pitches that come from a scrape to all be
   converted to pitches?  

I see your point; you've got a VCO which is supposed to put out an
accurate frequency but it's busy trying to track some mechanical noise
that is without a discernable pitch.  Some funky cross-modulation-like
sound from the VCO would be fine.

   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.

No, I want a guitar synth that's *something* like an electric guitar.
Just like an electric guitar is something like an acoustic guitar.
You don't approach an electric guitar anything like an acoustic
guitar, but the playing skills are somewhat similiar.

When you think about it, guitarists have been working toward a guitar
synth for a long time now on their own.  Is a pile of a dozen stomp
boxes all that different from a modular synth?  Listen to some of
Frank Zappa's live guitar solos where he goes through at least three
chains of effects boxes in parallel, each with some combination of
distortion, octave divider, auto wah, flange, whatever.  Frank treats
this mess a lot more like a synthesizer than like a guitar.

  -- Don

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