In a message dated 3/24/2000 8:04:45 PM,
goku@... writes:
>Hey, didn't someone else make a wired neck controller? Roland? Guitorgan?
Hi Terry,
Thanks for the info about the DG-20, it might make an interesting alternative
controller, if not a real guitar controller.
"Guitorgan?" you ask? Yes, the Guitorgan! In that instrument, Vox was able to
(through Herculean engineering feats) combine everything good about their
organs with everything that was good about their guitars(???) ..... and throw
them all away, leaving them out of this instrument entirely.
When I was in high school, a friend of mine had inherited one from his
grandfather. He loaned it to me for several months in 74 or 75. It looked
pretty cool with buttons and knobs all over it, and had that classic Vox mod
sixties shape. It was almost as light as two Les Paul Customs, and had wires
going through the neck for each note (I'd guess over a hundred) of the
fingerboard. So it had a neck that was almost as quick as a finely crafted
2'X4".
Since the string touching the fret closed the circuit which produced the
appropriate (at least theoretically) pitch for that note, each "fret" had to
be electrically separated so that adjacent strings would close different
circuits. As such, Vox (brilliantly!) decided to just make a little channel
in each fret between the strings. Oh sure, there might be a little problem if
one were to say "bend the strings across the fret" in that the note would
suddenly bottom out in that channel dying away entirely, but who'd do that
anyway! And one needs to make sacrifices if one is to go boldly into the
unexplored realms now possible with this instrument. And when you think about
it, how important was bending strings to guitar players in say 1968 when
these instruments were produced?
Now the bad news, unfortunately the guy who'd installed the oscillators, may
have had a bit too many on lunch hour -- if you know what I mean. So I found
that the D string had a much lower range than the low E string. I found that
I couldn't tune it to any open or standard (raised or lowered) tunings
because the ratios were all screwed up between the oscillators.
But other than that, it was a fine instrument. Clearly, it was the marketing
department that screwed up this instrument's chances of acceptance by a
hungry guitar playing population awaiting everything such an instrument could
deliver.
Now, why again did ARP go under?
JB