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Re: Gr-33/VG8



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.