Re: Re:Re: Best Cheap Guitar Synth

[a k butler <akbutler@tiscali.co.uk>]

>If your broke, listen to Andy and get some sort of
>distortion with some filters.  Couple that with a
>volume pedal (I like mine after the distortion and
>before the filter and delay) and you can get some
>pretty synthy tones out of your guitar with no
>glitching.  Add and ebow and fun will result.

yep, that's the ticket.

After, what's an analog synth but an oscillator running through a filter.

The guitar becomes the oscillator, so you just need a filter.
Then all the distortion does is add a load of harmonics (changing the 
"oscillator waveform" )
which give the filter more to work on.

Even the common wah-wah can sound synthy, if you put the distortion 
in front of it.

If you can get a filter that triggers on each note, that helps,
..and a similar, but more organic sound can be had if the filter frequency
responds to the volume of your playing (envelope follower).

The EH micro-synth has an octave divider too,
that's actually a synthesized tone an octave below the one you put in
( so if you play more than one note it really glitches).
So if you go for a simple distortion> filter setup you could
always add an octave divider later (Boss OC2 is recommended).

The Akai MFC-42 filter is available cheap these days, that's probably 
worth checking out
(I've never tried one, but Per recommends)

I actually have, and use the Line 6 Filter Pro.
It does have synth sounds as well as filters, so worth checking out.
I have to say though, that I'm not totally won over by it.
Although it produces a lot of different sounds in one box the synth tones 
are
very "digital" sounding, especially in the upper registers.
( either bad programming by line 6, or just that they didn't have the 
processing power to do it properly).
I had to work quite hard to get sounds I thought were acceptable.

other cheap filters

MAM Warp 9 , the most synth like, but difficult to program.

MAM Res 3 , easy to use, ...quirky

Zoom 1201 has a set of nice auto-filters, some of them triggered, and 
some responding to envelope.

andy butler
www.andybutler.com info & mp3s