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RE: OT: Guitar Synth



the axon-50, with the roland pickup, is pretty fast even on a bass, though it's fiddly to set up & (as noted elsewhere) the manual is a bit pants. I used to use a GI-10 with a strat-copy but the delay sucked.
 
the same guitar with the axon is so much better. the axon can tell, somehow, whereabouts you are picking the string aswell as how hard, & this data can be used to split patches so that different sounds emerge depending how you play. I didn't believe it until I tried it.
 
I have had some minor niggles with this thing on a jazz bass, most likely the pickup itself- I might try some piezos wired into the roland hardware instead of their pickup, & see how the axon likes that.
 
if you can find one that still works, the peavey midibase (sic) takes some beating- it uses split-frets switching, so the piezo pickups in the bridge are for dynamics only. there are strain gauges in the bridge too, so it supports pitch-bend which can (by judicious editing at your synth/sampler/w.h.y.) be "synchronised" with the actual bass sound. 
 
I don't know why there was never a guitar version- steve chick (who dreamt the thing up & licensed it first to valley arts & then peavey) was a bass player himself, & maybe he thought the guitar market was already well-enough catered for. maybe the split frets approach wouldn't work so well with the closer string-spacing of a guitar. dunno.
I use my peavey a lot for augmenting the bass guitar sound & also (with the bass turned off) for keyboard sounds & other noises. one has to keep the strings & frets very clean. the bass itself is pretty reasonable- I have two of them (but only one adaptor box), three digits apart in serial number, & the second one is nowhere near as good to play. they look awful, though. the fingerboard between the frets is covered with some sort of glued-on vinyl to cover up the wiring routs, I guess. some of it is beginning to detach. but for a 15 year old instrument, & an esoteric one at that, it's doing pretty well.
 
d.


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