Re: Smaller Speakers

[buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)]

>And forget about putting anything other than guitar sounds
>through it, the amp colors it too much.

Umm... so why do people put up with this for guitar?
I don't understand the amp obsession.  Why not learn
to love the sound of something other than the strange
coloring traditional guitar amps provide?  Is there
really something inherently "good" about them, some
deficiency in the tone of the guitar the amp makes
up for, or such?  Or are guitarists just used to how
guitars sound on other people's records?

What is wrong with Stanley Jordan's tone (I've never
heard it)?  Is it just not-what-you're-used-to?
Would you complain if it was coming out of a DX-7?

The music industry's obsession with recreating and
refining "flawed-but-familiar" technology (an obsession
shared throughout much of the worlds technology
research) feels to me like an inevitable consequence
of commerce:
  1. decide on some new "different" sound to try to achieve
     pick a sound that people are familiar with, so you can
     market it
  2. achieve it with varying degrees of success

repeat those steps over and over

So you have...
   cheesy analog synths (trying to imitate real sounds, very poorly)
   samplers (trying to imitate real sounds)
   new-fangled digital analog synths (trying to imitate the cheesy analogs)

Now, note that at the third step, the goal is not to sound
like the real sounds the cheesy analogs were a poor attempt
at--it's to sound _just like_ those cheesy analogs.  (They're
not really cheesy, just trying to use technically precise
language).

Similarly you have the attempts to replicate the old analog
roland drum machine, etc. etc.

In the computer graphics world, a year or two ago I read
several papers in a conference proceedings about software
that would take a photograph and "turn it into" what looked
like a watercolor painting of the same thing.  This has all
sorts of neat possibilities besides just using it to do same
old thing--e.g. animated watercolors--but the odd thing is
the amount of attention that goes into precisely replicating
-unintentional artifacts- of the medium.  Virtual brush strokes
produce various sorts of splotches and drips, and the programs go
to great lengths to reproduce these, so it will look "just like"
the real thing.

I understand the commerce motivation to sound/look "just like"
the real thing, but I find the end result to be such a waste
of energy--imagine if all that effort were to be put into
creating new sounds/looks! [*]

I guess the VG-8 attempts to balance this line--allowing
precise emulation of all sorts of guitars and amps while
also allowing new, never-before-heard things to be done
to it... but in general the process bugs the heck out of me.

Sean
[*] I guess this leads to miserable sales a la Vortex