Future Guitar : No Amps, No Pedals

[mrsoundboyking]

No Amps, No Pedals, No Future.

I’m pro-odd aesthetic notes. Reminds me of David Fair’s classic “How to play guitar” article:

http://users.wfu.edu/breckers/howtoplayguitar.htm

…which is tangentially related to the thread’s main concept insofar as it advocates total freedom from tradition.

[ether]

Progress.

[dude]

omg i have been looking for wireless system for downstairs back room music area. can you describe your experience, sound or any plug/play issues? of the boss wireless cable combo i mean.

that looks like so much future fun!!!

[ether]

In a word, it’s excellent. Worked straight away, sounds great, no discernible latency, allows for excellent rock star guitar poses without the fear of tripping over wires

[dude]

did you get the one for passive or active? i’m wondering which i should get in that i have a modular a rhodes a tr8s and a moog source all that could be variously piped wirelessly.

plus passive basses and guitar

[EqualTemperament]

I had a Boss GP-10 for a minute, and occasional got some really spectacular sounds out of it. Polyphonic distortion is serious instant gratification. And I once set up an elaborate shift register kind of system in PD that would capture the midi notes I was playing for independent sequencing. Super fun.

That said, mostly didn’t really gel with it, particularly on the sound design front. Tiny screen and one encoder, or a pretty clunky desktop editor. It also didn’t totally behave as expected on the midi front, but I may have been trying to shoehorn it into something. Remember trying to control the rate of an lfo with pitch bend in one of the logic synths and coming up short repeatedly.

Would definitely play hexaphonic again, just needed more care and feeding than I could give it at the time.

I’ve used the Boss GP-10, Roland GR-55 and VG-99. When I was playing on stage, I preferred the GP-10 due to its form factor, and the fact that I was really only needing bread and butter type guitar sounds. But definitely agree about editing programs on it.

If you can get your hands on a gently used VG-99, sound design becomes bliss with it’s large intuitive LCD and lots of hands on knobs and controllers to make adjustments with. Shame they discontinued it as I don’t think anything has been created since that really does what it does. It is really a bottomless playground for guitar.

The GR-55 is nice too. Kind of its own animal with the PCM synths.

I’ve definitely found hexaphonic (in particular the Roland solutions) preferable to pc/mac/ipad software.

[bookmil]

Just coming back to this thread after trying to work out how I’m going to make Norns and my guitar do fun things together, verdict still out on that. Norns/Guitar people what scripts are you using?

FWIW, I currently play a telecaster with dual P90s.

also wanted to check in with you Jason about your P90 troubles.

I have a Telecaster knock off that had the standard pickup setup and then I put a P90 in the neck, and I’m not great at soldering so I wired it out of phase with the bridge pickup. Now I have three very distinct tones (for guitar), how did you pickup research go?

[dansimco]

Is there a significant difference between p90s and jazzmaster pickups. I feel like there is a stack of tonal range in my jm. Which was the clincher in going that over my dream gibson, its just too versatile.

[ellips_s]

from what i’ve gathered, there is, but i’ve never actually been able to compare the two in person.

further complicating things: i briefly owned a squier j mascis jazzmaster, which i was later told (supposedly) has p90s disguised as jazzmaster pickups. regardless i loved the array of sounds from that guitar

[jasonw22]

how did you pickup research go?

alas, i haven’t pursued it. It’s been an “eleven pounds in a ten pound bag” kind of year…

[bookmil]

There is definitely a tonal difference between knock off telecaster neck and Lollar P90 neck, which is the change I made. The Lollar is louder and more round sounding, does better with OD/Fuzz/Dist.

I had a Jazzmaster but it was the Squier baritone so not the easiest thing to compare to P90s. From my research the JM pickups are perhaps slightly less output and have better cleans at full volume.

@jasonw22 sad to hear but I can put together a quick demo of the three pickup positions with my current config, I think getting an out of phase switch installed may be an option for you to add versatility without losing the P90 sound I assume you like

[jasonw22]

@jasonw22 sad to hear but I can put together a quick demo of the three pickup positions with my current config, I think getting an out of phase switch installed may be an option for you to add versatility without losing the P90 sound I assume you like

Sounds great, I’d really appreciate that!

[rick_monster]

Definitely worth messing with the pickups from guitar fetish imo. Another one to get something new out of a disappointing ‘1 dimensional’ guitar - sand the thick poly off the neck and top, rub in a bit of pure tung oil, play around with picking position, touch etc after doing this. Metal pick on bass, anyone?

There’s another hack - you can rewire the tone and volume controls ‘50s style’ (look it up)- this subjectively seems to make the tone and volume somewhat unpredictable in their interactions.

This kind of instrument plugged to a ‘proper’ tube amp is hard to describe and sounds like snake oil. But leo fender et al were designing with their ears tweaking combinations of passive pickup and classic amps.

There’s nothing magic about the old gear, but 50s amp and guitar designs sit in a crazy sweet spot for mod-ing and tweaking…

Many happy accidents to be had in this general area - though it is obviously very well trodden ground.

(Sorry that ended up hopelessly off topic for ‘future guitar’, maybe the old designs and more importantly the ‘ears first’ design approach has something useful for the future)

[KristofferLislegaard]

Be carefull! I did this, and all of a sudden there was no guitar either!

[909one]

Hey there, Sorry I didn’t get to read the whole thread yet, but I could never ever play a guitar without an amp. I don’t know how you can do it?!?! For me the amp is one with the guitar itself. All of the components in an amp (especially tube) interact in a way that creates this whole living organism, the compression and the harmonics added by the circuit is what makes guitar so interesting to me.
I’ve actually started putting my modular through my guitar amp!

I play experimental stuff as well, but I’ve avoided laptops at all costs. I can’t deal with latency and programs crashing. To each their own though!

[pbnn]

I see it essentially as this: a guitar is a stringed instrument that generates pitches by merit of the vibrating strings. The instrument in its purest form is thus the acoustic guitar, which just enhances the projection of the sound of the vibrating strings and coloring it by merit of wood selection construction etc. So for the instrument to be heard, a certain level of technology has to be employed (in this case woodworking), which has constantly evolved over the years. The electric guitar introduces the pickup and the generation of electrical current into the equation and has revolutionized the way in which the instrument would be heard. The pioneers who embraced this and all the implications that came with it, revolutionized music as it was then. By being able to keep up with a set of drums at full loudness, the entire composition of timbres available to a band changed, and things like heavy metal became possible. In a way, prefering a traditional amp and pedal setup is closely related to our preference for the sounds we know and love from decades of popular music, the challenge is to find new sounds and new ways of speaking through the instrument, that might excite us in a new way. Just think of Hendrix and the explosion of creativity he introduced to the instrument. Today I think we are trapped to a certain degree, where our ears might be a bit tired of generic “good” guitar sounds playing the same old tropes in slight variations over and over again. Within this framework it takes true genius to break the mould: think Julian Lage playing a very traditional setup, but harmonically playing so creatively and with so much emotion and variation, that it still sounds new and fresh to us (or me at least). On the other end of the spectrum is the opportunity to consider where technology is at today. The pure merit of being able to create a current with our instrument and plug that current into anything that can interpret it makes for endless new ways of being heard. If the guitar amp allowed us to establish the band format as the predominant force in popular music for a few decades, in what way can the digitalisation and democratization of music production enable a new shift? For me, plugging my guitar directly into my interface and opening up Bitwig feels so freeing creativly, that I almost have to laugh at my little Fender practice amp when I see all the little tonal palettes from yesteryear that it promises to reproduce faithfully. I love those sounds, but that is just not where I live creativly today.

[909one]

Yeah I’m all down for taking guitar to new territories. Julian Lage is a great example for sure, he’s a monster.
I personally think a magnetic pickup sounds really boring and bland without the harmonics created from a tube amp or a good solid state one. I’m a tone snob about vco’s too, I’ve tried digital stuff but I only use analog as well because there’s just something about idiosyncrasies of harmonics created from different components.
That’s just my preference.

[mattleaf]

Great thread. Wonder how this worked out for you these days @ether. Love the idea of taking guitar in this direction, even a few favourite pedals in the mix cant hurt. Some of those wireless devices look handy, Blueboard could be quite nice with Ableton’s looper for instance. Thanks for the thoughts.

[Ithacus]

A simple idea, and a brilliant one:

How to imitate cello and violin on guitar

This sounds way better than I thought it would

[steveoath]

Did anyone here back the Mod Dwarf? I did I the hopes that it can provide an interesting plug n play between my guitar and laptop without having to mic up my amp.