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Looper's Delight
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I have not played the more modern guitar synth controllers, but I have owned both a Roland GR-500 and an Ibanez MIDI guitar. I did some interesting things with each of them, but I found myself driven back to straight guitar because of a weird feeling of disconnect with my playing. That was probably partially a latency issue but probably also something about expressiveness or lack thereof. Bear in mind that I am far from a speedy player. I also haven't developed lots of subtle nuances in my playing (though I hope I've got some). I also don't have a feeling that I need to hear a "guitar sound" when I play a note since I've at times gone in for fairly heavy processing to the point where people less familiar with what you can do to an electric guitar ask me what instrument they are listening to. What I think I'd like right now is something that fed a hex pickup into a six way fuzz (I'm partial to Line6's Big Muff emulation these days) and then fed those signals through six low-pass filters set with their frequencies offset based on guitar tuning but being driven from a single expression pedal to do the sweep. If I wanted to get fancy, I'd throw in some envelope generators. My idea here is that this would allow me to do something similar to my current sound but do so polyphonically. I think this is actually moderately close to the architecture of the GR-100 or GR-300. Does anyone know? Does anyone know of a more modern box that does something like this? Is something like this buried in the VG88? The Boss wave generator was a real disappointment. An option without resorting to the hex pickup might be something like the PAiA Quadrafuzz. It's been a long time, however, since I've done any soldering. Getting back to guitar synths, I have to admit that there were things about the GR-500 that I liked. My favorite may have been the effect when it lost pitch tracking and the note would wander off in strange ways as the sound died out. This, however, was never reliably triggerable so it was just a "happy" accident when it occurred. Mark P.S. As I noted to Tom Heasley, listening to his performance made me want to go find a set of Moog Taurus pedals so that I could throw in the occasional thunderous low drone. I figure there isn't a way for me to incorporate a tuba into my guitar playing -- and I don't have the lung capacity -- but those low notes hit one in a really wonderful way.