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Looper's Delight
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Sean T Barrett wrote: > Well, this is an interesting theory and statement. > Maybe I'm just a moron; I've spent ten years playing > a cheap guitar through a chorus pedal, a little eq > and reverb, direct to a 4-track. It doesn't feel lifeless > to me, although maybe I don't know any better. Whoa. I don't think that this is meant to be a personal attack, or some sort of auditory litmus test. For the first four years of my playing, I was very into the Cocteau Twins, Tones On Tail, and exploring how to make my guitar not sound like a guitar. My rig at the time was a Rat pedal, my beloved Quadroverb+, and a PA. I have recorded a ton of stuff through the same rig, through an old stereo EQ right into my four-track (still do record direct a lot) and the sound kicks ass. > Still, I don't consider the guitar direct > "half the instrument". Is an acoustic guitar > only 1/3 of an instrument because it lacks a pickup > and an amp? But it wouldn't surprise me if you considered your effects part of you instrument. > I don't _feel_ like > I'm missing anything. Then your probably not. > I find it outrageous to imagine > that getting an expensive amphead, a Marshall brake, > 2 4x12 (or whatever) cabinets, and a pair of really > good microphones is going to make my music sound > "better". Different, sure. There is a definite interaction between a good tube amp and a guitar. You may not think it is all that much fun. Some people don't like it when I solo using my pitch shifter set with a half step. > Another person explicitly raised the issue that > the advantage to amp cabinet coloration is that > the distorted guitar tone benefits from filtering. > I could believe this, but then why do we need > "speaker simulators"? Why not just a simple > low-pass filter on the output of your (possibly > tube-based) distortion pedal? I under the impression that is what an amp simulator is. Maybe there is some compression as well? > I guess I'm just struck by the arbitrariness of tone/instrument > choice. The endless quest to produce the perfect piano > synthesizer, the hammond b-3 synthesizer, etc. etc. > But I suppose we do have the pianos and hammonds of > today... the electic guitar itself, or more recently, the > Stick and Warr guitar. But the construction of sound > from electrons themselves is so much more powerful and > flexible than stretching thin wires very taut (although > the latter clearly has certain advantages), that I'd > expect all sorts of new and exciting possibilities > coming out of them... and instead it feels like the > last "surprising" thing coming out of the digital > domain was DX7-ish FM synthesis. No, I take that > back. Pitch-shifting is a new digital-only effect. My favorite pitch shifter is either the Boss Octaver or an MXR Blue Box. Both are analog. But by the above arguement, we would all be playing keyboards. All the amp simulators/physical modeller are trying to do (this is just a guess) is let one guy show up a gig with a clean Vox sound, a semi-distorted Fender sound, and a Marshall set on 'kill' without having to bring three expensive, ugainly and heavy amps and figuring out a way to switch between them. Hey if there was a gadget that worked that did that, I'd buy two. Trevor