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Riddle Me This: Synth vs. Guitar


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So here's my question: Why do so many keyboard players want to be able to make their synth/sampler sound like a guitar, but based on the sales of MIDI guitar, not a whole lot of guitarists want to sound like a keyboard players?

 

Really, this is a serious question. Just what is it about guitar that makes keyboard players want to be able to sound like it?

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I've been playing guitar for 8 years and keyboard for 5+ months. Here's my thoughts.

 

Guitar is very expressive. Keyboard can be too, but theres a certain character to a guitar, and the way it can be handled and played. It's so emotive. I'm sure someone can do something good on a keyboard with a guitar patch, but I think the difference will be heard.

 

I dunno, I'd much rather play my guitar than play a guitar on a keyboard.

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I was unaware that a keyboardist would want to play some keys and sound like a guitarist...

 

For me, there's a few expressive instruments out there, and they all involve having fingers on strings.

 

Unless they've changed things, I don't see any piano players making chords by opening up the piano and placing their fingers on the strings.

 

I fancy myself a guitar player, and I'm sticking with it until it doesn't work, or it doesn't get me laid, whichever comes first. You might be able to fake a guitar riff on a keyboard, but you'll never, ever, be able to pass off a sample/loop/synth as a guitar player. Ever.

 

The guitar is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, instruments of expression ever built. Perhaps more can be done with a bow, but who really wants to listen to a violin for more than 45 minutes?

 

Raise your hand, and then go back to your room...

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I'm a drummer, so it is easier for me to HIT on a keyboard. The Keyboard MIDI interface is solid and responsive.

 

My wife is a guitar player and I bought her a MIDI guitar over 10 years ago. It mistriggered and had stuck notes GALORE so she only picked it up a few times. After an experience like that I can't blame her if she doesn't want to play a MIDI guitar.

 

Dan

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I'm originally a guitarist and I don't have much desire to make synths sound like a guitar but I have in the past because of some acoustic guitar sounds I have. I realized that my keyboard playing would sound like the way I finger picked a guitar. These days I'm more into tweeking my VAZ modular for its weirdness.

 

Steve

You shouldn't chase after the past or pin your hopes on the future.
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Sounds are a lot of fun to play with. I have very limited experience on a guitar synth, except for a few years ago at the (now defunct) Guitar World store in KC. I was playing a Godin Roland ready something or other, and they just about had to pry it out of my hands. Except, that little deal...what do they call it...(I sound like a foreigner here) where there's a split second delay between hitting the strings and the sound you hear, barely perceptible, but can be a trifle distracting. Still, I think that guitar players just haven't been exposed enough. Usually, the technology is expensive and clumsy, and is outmoded quickly. Most guitar players are still trying to get the right sound out of their guitar, much less try and get it to sound like flutes or strings.
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There are several factors at work here, and I think the original premise is an apples to oranges thing. A keyboard player attempting to sound like a guitar is very different than a guitar player wanting synth sounds. But since you are asking about the disparity in numbers...

 

I think there are a lot of keyboard players want a great (meaning authentic) guitar sound because it's so important in western twelve-tone popular music. Keyboard players these days are arrangers and composers, and often they are expected to be able to emulate drums, bass, strings guitars, piano, organ, ad nauseum. So to have good guitar sounds (and to know how to play them) is really an awesome competitive advantage. Back when the proteus was about as good as it got for ROMplers, I dove into the subject big time. I created a 16 layer proteus/Emax II patch that had delayed feedback, multiple attack timbres, pick scrapes, behind-the-nut harmonics...the whole thing (all dry...no distortion in the synth sound). And then I spent months studying guitar voicings-there was a period of time in the early nineties where my muscle memory wouldn't let me play more than 6 note chords. :) I used real guitar tube pre's and cabs. It still didn't sound like a real guitar, but it filled that part of the arrangement spectrum pretty well. I used to play lead on "Flying in a Blue Dream" at the time, for example.

 

Acoustic guitar, is one of the holy grails for keyboardists that are into that kind of thing. I'm still working on that one...

 

On the other hand, guitarists (in general) are more focused in terms of sounds that they are trying to acheive. Most guitar players that i have worked with realize that most non-guitar sounds are not conducive to being played with a six-string fretted user interface. Six note polyphony is extremely limiting when you are doing a B3 smear or a piano gliss. So I think most people who buy guitar synths are looking more for sweetening, an effect, or a substitute for a keyboard player when playing live. Again most guitarists I know would rather try to plunk out a drum pattern or piano chord changes on a keyboard rather than try to do it on their Strat.

"For instance" is not proof.

 

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It's all just a matter of control.I play the guitar the way I play the key's on a synth. It just sounds better that way when you got control .

 

If you can jump from one to the other, great, I'm not much of a pianist at all, but I can play a keyboard like a guitar. Mostly for CRAZY groovey sounds, we are all just "sound" makers anyway, right?

 

I haven't said this to many people before, but if Hendrix could get the sound he wanted from a spare tire he would have played that, it's about the sound "man", can you dig it brother? Ya, well, here's another thing, a little loose Jam, hey what the hell, Johnny B Goode!!!!!!!! :love:

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I believe the glitches, mistriggers and delay inherent in the Roland GK synth pickup has much to do with midi guitar never really picking up. The tracking can be improved, but they are difficult to set up properly, AFAIK. One reason Pat Metheny still swears by his old GR-300 guitar synth is that it had nothing to do with midi whatsoever. It was analog, tracked quickly and accurately, and therefore was very expressive. Guitarists don't want to troubleshoot, they just wanna play. ;)
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Pat Metheny was cool for about 2 years, and I guess the dude is still doing-it, but did he ever stretch the boundaries of music? Especially after you get into the comfort zone, you gotta go for it or die a pathetic old fart.

 

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Originally posted by Anderton:

So here's my question: Why do so many keyboard players want to be able to make their synth/sampler sound like a guitar, but based on the sales of MIDI guitar, not a whole lot of guitarists want to sound like a keyboard players?

It's an interesting question, and like zeronyne I have some disagreement with the premise. These days, guitars AND keyboards ARE synths. :thu:

 

Some silly questions:

 

- When guitar players play classical trills, are they imitating keyboards?

 

- When guitar players use classical scales, are

they imitating keyboards?

 

- When guitar players use filter (Wah) circuits are they using synths?

 

- When guitar players achive long sustain, are they imitating keyboards?

 

- If guitar players use a volume pedal to remove the attack and create a slow swell, are they imitating a VCA envelope?

 

I disagree with the premise of such questions as well.

 

Originally posted by Anderton:

So here's my question: Why do so many keyboard players want to be able to make their synth/sampler sound like a guitar, but based on the sales of MIDI guitar, not a whole lot of guitarists want to sound like a keyboard players?

I play in a church band with two guitarists. Each of them has a Roland GR synth unit an a VG amp modelling unit. Why? Range of expression.

 

I might use guitar tones on my synth when one of them might be playing a B3 sound, the other a low e-bow drone, and I carry the rhythm. It's all good. :thu:

 

Though I tend to use a clav sound more than a guitar sound, even in such contexts. It's not a real clav though. :rolleyes:

 

I do have some leads on my synths that utilize fuzz/amp sound and wah/filter expressions. I don't think of these as guitar sounds. They are just the natural idiom of rock music and they are needed for a certain kind of aggressive play. When I use them, I still do glisses, keyboardish trills, portamento sweeps and other tricks a guitarist couldn't do. Sometimes, I use distorted B3 tones that are way more aggressive than what our guitarists use. It's all good. :thu:

 

I've read and leared from some of your pieces from way back when, You know all this, but ...

 

The overdriving of VCA and filter circuits were originally modular components controlled by a keyboard. These were later associated with guitars through the use of stompboxes. The idea of tube amp overdrive is a natural historical thing that occured anytime a narrow range tube amp was stressed. Regardless of the guitar, ep or organ tones that were being sent through it.

 

The difference is that it became a natural part of guitar idiom, due in part to the fact that the culture could develop faster in a densely congregated group of musicians (guitarists). Kudos to them.

 

Consider this however, what is the "natural" sound of the electric guitar without outboard circuit coloration? :D

 

Admittedly it's a synth biased question? :D

 

So really, it's a question of idiom, not sound. Why do keyboardists often use guitaristic idioms in playing?

 

Because it is the dominant idiom. And it has some expressive merit. The process is similar to the manner in which wah pedal designers emulated the "natural" wah of the jazz brass instrument.

 

As this outfolds, the lines will become more blurred still. I think instrumentalists will always resort to whatever dominant idiom is in place. Secondly they will always imitate the human voice ... simply because the human ear and brain have evolved to respond emotionally to it.

 

Best,

 

Jerry

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I use several different guitar patches when I perform live on my Kurzweil K26X. I also use sequences with pseudo-strumming for a nice backround ie. "Piano man". I also use patches that add an occasional very realistic random fret-squeak which is real cool. I have a sample CD with sounds produced by some great former Kurzweil sound engineers that really can fool most folks with strumming, fretboard thumping, muting and incredible harmonics ...but not ALL of em'. ;) I also have the use of one big-ass ribbon controller and a smaller one for manually applied vibrato, as well as the standard wheels for pitch bending. Personally, I would kill to learn the acoustic guitar for one main reason. I love the sound of the human voice along side a guitar, as opposed to a piano. Too many frikking overtones on the keys that "take away" some of the awesome complexity inherent in the human voice. I like the simplicity of a "one string" kind of sound. Guitar tones just don't compete for sonic real estate like a true piano sound does. And yes, guitars are way cooler. :) ---Lee

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Many things have been said that are true...I'll point to what comes to my mind immediatly.

 

Guitar is the instrument that mostly determined aesthetically the sound of rock music in all it's incarnations, it's not an instrument like all the others, it's rock essence.

 

The search of a guitar sound on keyboards is not a recent thing, the opposite has much more sense maybe...today, as pointed above in the thread, technology tries to offer ways to manage guitar emulations and arpeggios, just as a must have for the electronic musician that needs a wide sound palette for his work.

 

But in the past there was a research on keyboards to reach the spirit of guitar, that revolutionary abuse of pitch bends, distortion, sweetness and furious rebellion that icons like Jimi brougth to the music.

A couple of examples can be Jan Hammer with the Mahavishnu orchestra, whose battles with John Mc Laughlin and Jerry Goodman are memorable, and John Lord of Deep Purple, whose power chords on hammond are so perfectly guitarish and rock-ish that few guitarists have been so effective.

 

Obviously this had nothing to do with a perfect emulation of a sound, but with the perfect interpretation of a feeling.

 

The other aspect of the problem, guitarists that want to sound as a synth, found it's limitations in technical issues. I fully understand the desire, as I am a guitarist and a synthesis maniac, but I started refusing the concept of midi guitar, I'm not really interested in it.

 

Paradoxically, I find the sound of a good guitar amplified by tubes something much closer to the synthesis spirit. A passive volume pedal and a good quality wha pedal are perfect examples of envelope and filter. Midi for guitar is just a tool for work in some occasions, very similar to an ac. guitar sound on a keyboard.

 

A different thing is the derivation of a control voltage (real or virtual) from guitar's pitch. Here we are on a creative territory again, we are not going to simulate anything, to many limitations (fortunately I say), we are expanding the spirit of modern guitar throug electronics, we still live that spirit...

 

:)

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I dunno what to say, Craig.

 

I hate the fact of playing "brass" on a Keyboard. Even worse, to imitate a guitar. Maybe it was fashionable some yeara ago, now I find it kinda silly.

 

Synths have got their own voice.

If people wants a guitar, grab a strings-bender :D

 

MIDI Guitar controllers have never been that attractive. They are expensive and not everybody find them very usable AND not so many MIDI modules respond properly to Legato modes. That's maybe the simplest explanation to your question.

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One factor: for keyboardists, the capability comes aboard their regular MIDI instruments without their having to seek out special controllers. For guitarists, playing a MIDI guitar involves getting a MIDI synth and a guitar controller, a very significant investment.

 

Another factor -- keyboard players are generally way better musicians than guitarists are. Being able to play guitar-like parts is as simple for them as being able to play trumpet-like parts, with the exception of having to get comfortable with appropriate use of the pitch bend wheel. Whereas guitarists are usually (and often proudly) not very good musicians. They wouldn't know how to cop a keyboard-like voicing to save their lives - and they'd find a way to call this a strength rather than a weakness :)

 

So keyboardists both have the gear they need by default, by and large, along with the musical knowledge and skill to easily adapt to copping guitar parts, while guitarists have to make a special purchase and would have to actually learn something outside the guitar box in order to emulate other instruments, which would be like asking them to read a chart or something, fer chrissakes...

 

:)

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I agree with Mixterader, it's all a case of "guitar envy." Guitar is the way-coolest instrument on the block, followed at a distant second by tenor sax. :cool:

 

But seriously, folks, maybe it's just the "challenge" factor. So far, guitar (and sax too, for that matter), are hard to do convincingly on a synth. FWIW, I think performance issues play at least as big a role as timbre in sythesizing these instruments, and it's hard to cop that fingers-strings-frets synergy with keys and a pitch bender.

 

As to the other side of the issue, I know at least four guys using guitar synths (well, one's a bass player, but that still counts to me) regularly in their bands to good effect. Usually it's used to add parts along with the conventional guitar sounds, although one guy seems to get jazzed by playing organ and harmonica solos on his guitar. These are all three-piece bands, BTW, so I'm sure at least at the outset, guitar synth was seen as a way to fatten up the band without having to pay a keyboard player. ;)

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I think it may also be due to ease of use.

 

Regardless of how much outboard gear guitarists may use, the guitar is still pretty much a plug n' play instrument. Guitarists are used to getting a sound right away without substantially changing the way we play.

 

I have a midi guitar rig that I almost never use. It's an Ibanez guitar fitted with a Roland GR-2 midi pickup that feeds a Blue Chip Axon AX-100 controller and a Kurzweil K2500 synth/sampler. In order for it to work properly, a considerable amount of time must be spent configuring both the controller and the synth. Even then I must radically alter my picking technique and there is a very slight latency.

 

It sounds great and I can get some really neat sounds but takes a lot of effort.

 

Likewise, I can get great sounds by plugging my guitar straight into a tube amp and turning a couple of knobs.

 

Maybe if the technology becomes more user-friendly, more guitarists will want to emulate other instruments.

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The first instrument I tried was piano, which I started around kindergarten. My first teacher was of the rap-the-knuckes school, and after my sister took a few lessons, I was at another teacher's. I tried guitar when I was ten or twelve. My parents rented a Harmony arch top from a local music store and scheduled me for lessons. I remember crying at the piano bench because I couldn't hold the strings down hard enough to make music. I think I did two or three lessons before we took the guitar back. I soon took up trumpet in fifth grade. I had a great teacher who was an old big-band jazz guy, pencil thin mustache and all. He emphasized tone over technique.

 

When I was seventeen, I took the bus to downtown Washington and bought a Harmony classic and a book of Bob Dylan songs. I just learned the chords and tried to sing along. Guitar was still the hardest for me to learn. You are doing three quite different muscular things with both your hands. The playing surface is laid out both horizontally and vertically, so that you can play the same note in several different variations of fingering. You can do this also with some wind instruments. After playing guitar for ten to twelve years, I developed a bone spur on my left thumb, which made playing painful. It was a slow process, but I vowed to relearn keyboards and bought one of the early Yamaha portable keyboards, which still does have a pretty neat harpisicord option.

 

The really hard thing about keyboards is the charts. Here you are thinking both horizontally and vertically and in some other unknown to me dimension between that big C: on the bottom stave and cursive G above it, where things slip a cog, but not in the logical direction. Guitar tab is no snap, but is kind of a visual representation of the fretboard. The staves for a similarly derived tab for keyboard would be at least a few octaves tall and a complete one would be 88 spaces (even more for premium grands). I sometimes wonder if western musical notation will go the way of Morse code some day.

 

I've tried the guitar sounds in a lot of keyboards and found few of them that approach "real" guitar sound, though some of them surely come from actual guitar performance.

 

The difference is that both hands modify the tones in several ways, the fretting hand bending and muting the strings, adding vibrato, pulling off. The picking hand has individual elements of attack and muting, picks or fingers, and some percussive possibilities.

 

I haven't heard much in the way of guitar synths, but the first one I heard did sound a little like a B3 in the background. It was a reggae band and he was doing some kind of backbeat chords. The crowded bar kept me from seeing all the members of the band for quite a while.

 

I have always loved the sound of acoustic piano, and although synths seem to capture it quite well, the true acoustic overtones just get me off.

 

In short, "Ain't nothing like the real thing."

 

and

 

"Vive la difference."

 

Henry

He not busy being born

Is busy dyin'.

 

...Bob Dylan

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I think the primary answer is really pretty simple.

 

People who play synth instruments have been creating and using emulative sounds since the origin of the instrument. This obviously isn't limited to guitar sounds. Strings, horns, drums and so on have been part of the keyboardist's bag of tricks for a few decades.

 

Guitar, as versatile as it is, has never been expected to be used to emulate instruments other than itself. Also, as a trigger/controller device, in as much as it has advanced much since the days of huge latency and so on, it's still inferior to the keyboard-oriented paradigm, with both hands simultaneously accessible for control and note generation.

 

One last thing: guitarists, historically, have been a little more technophobic than keyboardists. It could be that the simplicity of plugging in and playing doesn't lend itself to setting up MIDI, choosing sounds, triggering from multiple devices and so on.

 

I (and of course you, Craig) have extensive experience playing on both, and like everything, both have their own unique advantages. But I'm not going to be doing any Rhodes parts with my Les Paul any time soon. ;)

 

- Jeff

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You can get a lot of really great sounds with synths and samplers, regardless of the controller. The modern electronic keyboard is a versitle instrument that makes it easy to emulate other instruments, and some of the aural possiblities these days are absolutly stunning.

 

But for me, and acoustic guitar clean sounds so nice in it's simplicity. It's expressive and can be delicate or raw and brusing.

 

And there is nothing, N-O-T-H-I-N-G that sounds like an electric guitar driving output tubes. Clean or overdriven, or right on the edge, when you can almost drive the amp into saturation practically by thinking about it, then pull back into a chime at the end of a phase. It's even better when you're in the same room, that's why hearing a guitar band live is so exciting.

 

It's the best instrument there ever was.

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In my own case, I do try to make the keys sound like guitar on a few songs where I cannot do both keys & guitar simultaneously. I do it in a chunky, rhythmic context - I'm not striving to truly sound like a guitar as much as I am simply trying to play acceptable accompaniment for the tune.

 

The other way I try to sound like a guitarist is when I'm trying to do the JanHammer-esque "lead synth" thing. And I'm not trying to sound exactly like guitar so much as I'm just trying to play cool lead synth - but I guess all pitch-bends are automatically associated with lead guitar (to be fair, Hammer was indeed getting inspiration from lead guitar in developing his style).

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Why do so many keyboard players want to be able to make their synth/sampler sound like a guitar, but based on the sales of MIDI guitar, not a whole lot of guitarists want to sound like a keyboard players?
This question seems to imply a "guitar-envy" from keyboard players that I believe rarely exists. Keyboard players want keyboards that sound like everything under the sun.

 

When choosing an instrument to learn, people who want to create a huge variety of sounds are generally drawn to keyboards. Perhaps this is because they don't initially know of other alternatives, and are already proficient at playing keyboards by the time they hear of MIDI drums, guitar, etc.

 

The working world of music reinforces this role. A keyboard player's job is to create all sorts of sounds. On the other hand, a guitar player's job is to create guitar sounds, a drummer's job is to create drum sounds, etc.

 

Of course, there are some who play a keyboard instrument who are content to not be "sound chameleons." For example, a pianist's job is to create piano sounds and an organist's job is to create organ sounds. There are a wide variety of reasons to be drawn to play a keyboard instrument and a wide variety of desired results from those who play.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

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First off, I think Gus summed it up nicely.

 

Originally posted by Gus Lozada:

...MIDI Guitar controllers have never been that attractive. They are expensive and not everybody find them very usable AND not so many MIDI modules respond properly to Legato modes. That's maybe the simplest explanation to your question.

Playing other instruments on guitar synths, even if you solve the latency and mis-fire issues, is still limited by the 6 strings and virtual necessity of using both hands to play single not lines. That makes further expression via aftertouch and other control surfaces added to the guitar difficult, especially when you compare it to the one note per key aspect of a keyboard.

 

I've played around with guitar synths since the mid-1980's and I have yet to play one that I enjoyed. Much of this has less to do with the midi conversion and more to do with the number of chord voicings I could create. I was never going to make piano parts on guitar sound like the wide OR, especially, close voicings available on a piano. So why try? Even my limited ability on piano sounds better than piano on a guitar controller, IMO.

 

Keyboard players, OTOH as Geoff Grace pointed out, were born out of the ability to sound like virtually anything. We're not talking about pianists. We're talking about synthisists. Why would a synthisist use a limited control surface? Of course they would grab as good a keyboard as possible. The only market for guitar synth is to those few guitarists who would like to cop a few licks for other instruments or even fewer who are so attached to the guitar that they insist on synthesizing on a guitar-like controller. Why would anyone expect those markets to be anything other than a tiny niche of a niche? (Let's face it, for all the instruments sold, the entire MI market is a drop in the bucket when compared to other product markets.)

 

Originally posted by Jerry Aiyathurai:

It's an interesting question, and like zeronyne I have some disagreement with the premise. These days, guitars AND keyboards ARE synths. :thu:

 

Some silly questions:

 

- When guitar players play classical trills, are they imitating keyboards?

 

- When guitar players use classical scales, are they imitating keyboards?

 

- When guitar players use filter (Wah) circuits are they using synths?

 

- When guitar players achive long sustain, are they imitating keyboards?

 

- If guitar players use a volume pedal to remove the attack and create a slow swell, are they imitating a VCA envelope?

 

I disagree with the premise of such questions as well...

 

Best,

 

Jerry

Jerry, you make some interesting points, but I think you're missing the big picture. As previously stated, guitar synths are a tiny speck on a tiny speck that represents musical instrument sales. And it ain't gonna change, because there are few guitarists who view themselves as a whole slew of instruments as keyboard players do.

 

While electric guitars have are used in synth type ways, there is a direct touch factor that several have discussed here that separates and electric guitar from an electronic keyboard. The string you touch is the sound generator, and it's induced signal is modified. Keyboards are activators of electronic engines. No direct connection between your fingers and the resulting sound's timbre or expression unless you program it.

 

As for the bold highlight, above, I'd hardly call it imitation of keyboards when guitarists play classical scales, as the guitar's ancestors date back hundred's, if not thousands of years before any keyboard instrument. ;)

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Originally posted by Anderton:

So here's my question: Why do so many keyboard players want to be able to make their synth/sampler sound like a guitar, but based on the sales of MIDI guitar, not a whole lot of guitarists want to sound like a keyboard players?

 

Really, this is a serious question. Just what is it about guitar that makes keyboard players want to be able to sound like it?

I'm going to answer before I read all the other responses so that they don't influence my response:

 

I think it's a historical thing. Though history, keyboard players have had a variety of tonal options available that use the same basic "interface" (ie keys)... harpsichord, clav, piano, organ, etc. Of course, with the coming of synths and samplers, those options increased. And a lot of instruments became "playable" from the traditional keyboard interface. Problem is, some of them are easier to play convincingly from the keyboard than others. As a guitarist and sax player, I find that those two things are among the hardest instruments to accurately emulate from a keyboard - mostly because of the nature and expressiveness of the instruments which makes emulating them from a keyboard interface tricky. But I think keyboardists have gotten used to having a lot of sounds available to them, and since the guitar is such a large part of many modern musical styles, it's only natural for them to want to be able to do "guitaristic" type stuff.

 

Guitarists have not had that same historical access to different sounds. Sure, there's been various acoustical guitar types (classical, archtops, steel string flat tops, 12 strings) as well as electric guitars of various flavors, but the guitar has always been more limited and even the electric guitar is a relatively new development. And guitar synth technology has not kept pace with keyboard synths. If it wasn't for Roland's admirable dogged determination and loyalty to the concept, they would probably have died off a long time ago. But while things HAVE gotten better for guitarists who want to have access to synth tones, there's still quite a few who got turned off by early attempts at products that glitched, mistracked, had huge latency / delays between hitting the note and hearing the sound, wouldn't respond to all their techniques or required the player to seriously modify their playing, etc.... and the bad taste that it left in their mouth prevented them from ever going back and trying the later / improved stuff.

 

There's stilll some folks who are doing it... I am produycing an album right now where nearly as much of the synth stuff was done on a guitar synth as from a keyboard - but I think that guitarists and synths have a bigger set of historical and technical issues to overcome than keyboard players do - at least when it comes to emulating the other's axe.

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Originally posted by Jeff Da Weasel:

Originally posted by Sylver:

It's the best instrument there ever was.

Except a kazoo through a Telefunken U47. But it's almost that good. :thu:

 

- Jeff

Well, anytime you get to hum into something German ... wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, SAY NO MORE!
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