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Looper's Delight
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kim: >I guess you're not a guitar player, right? An electric guitar >by itself is only half the instrument. [snip] >That is also why a guitar through a flat PA system will sound >very bad, and to the player, it will feel lifeless. Well, this is an interesting theory and statement. Maybe I'm just a moron; I've spent ten years playing a cheap guitar through a chorus pedal, a little eq and reverb, direct to a 4-track. It doesn't feel lifeless to me, although maybe I don't know any better. Still, I don't consider the guitar direct "half the instrument". Is an acoustic guitar only 1/3 of an instrument because it lacks a pickup and an amp? I realize you didn't intend this as a combative statement, rather an explanation to a non-guitarist outsider about why amplifiers are important, so now perhaps my puzzlement is clearer. I don't _feel_ like I'm missing anything. I find it outrageous to imagine that getting an expensive amphead, a Marshall brake, 2 4x12 (or whatever) cabinets, and a pair of really good microphones is going to make my music sound "better". Different, sure. But "better"? Much as I really can't imagine what magic I could hear if I touched my fingers to a Klein. Maybe I'm just a philistine--_tone_ deaf, as it were--and maybe someday I'll have the requisite ear-opening experience. Another person explicitly raised the issue that the advantage to amp cabinet coloration is that the distorted guitar tone benefits from filtering. I could believe this, but then why do we need "speaker simulators"? Why not just a simple low-pass filter on the output of your (possibly tube-based) distortion pedal? [re: watercolors in specific, but also sound and synthesis in general] >Usually those imperfections are what made >it unique and desireable in the first place. [snip] >If you truly want to recreate that digitally, you need to >replicate all of the characteristics that make it that way. I agree totally. The question is _why_ "truly recreate it digitally"? I was trying to point out the consequences of "true re-creation"--perhaps it is twice as much work accurately reproducing all the frills and accidental properties of something as it would be to simply make something new and never before seen. [And I know the answer to "why", see next paragraph :) ] >>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 can tell you from experience that trying to do new things is what often >turns into a huge waste of energy, or money mostly. It takes a long, long >time for people to adopt it and start to use it. Of course. Hence my phrase "the commerce motivation". You gots ta eat! But I still think it sucks. I guess I'm just struck by the arbitrariness of tone/instrument choice. The endless quest to produce the perfect piano synthesizer, the hammond b-3 synthesizer, etc. etc. But I suppose we do have the pianos and hammonds of today... the electic guitar itself, or more recently, the Stick and Warr guitar. But the construction of sound from electrons themselves is so much more powerful and flexible than stretching thin wires very taut (although the latter clearly has certain advantages), that I'd expect all sorts of new and exciting possibilities coming out of them... and instead it feels like the last "surprising" thing coming out of the digital domain was DX7-ish FM synthesis. No, I take that back. Pitch-shifting is a new digital-only effect. I could go on, but this rant is mostly off-topic, so I better stop. Sean