Re: Sustainers and pickups

[Kim Flint <kflint@chromatic.com>]

At 06:13 PM 5/7/97 -0000, you wrote:
>>
>>A common use is hexaphonic distortion. If you distort each string
>>individually and then mix it together, you don't get the inter-modulation
>>distortion that you get with a normal guitar plugged into a fuzz box. 
>This
>>basically means that you can play distortion chords without the extreme
>>muddiness you usually get. 
>>
>I'd always been fascinated by this idea, but I thought you needed a 
>sepearate speaker for each string.  Can you just distort each string 
>seperately and then combine it back into one speaker?
>
>Travis Hartnett

sure. Its the distortion itself that causes the muddiness. When you have 
two
notes together going into a distortion of some kind, the non-linearities
cause a situation where harmonics of each note modulate each other and
produce all sorts of other frequencies. These frequencies are generally not
harmonically related to the others, resulting in a muddy mess. Unless the
speaker is the thing distorting, it has nothing to do with it.

If you've ever used pitch shifiting after a distortion effect, you've
basically heard the difference. The harmonies created by the pitch-shifting
come through just fine, even though each note is a distorted signal. 

kim
_______________________________________________________
Kim Flint                       408-752-9284
VLSI Systems Engineering        kflint@chromatic.com
Chromatic Research