Re: Acoustic guitars modeling

[Mike Barrs <mbarrs@nightviewer.com>]

>Roland's V-Guitar system let you so all sorts of things with the 
>tuning--alternate tunings, octave displacements, etc.  You had to make 
>sure you were playing loud enough that you didn't hear any acoustic sound 
>from your instrument though, because it sounded horrible.  You also miss 
>out on all the sympathetic resonances that actual alternate tunings 
>encourage, so things were a bit "dead" sounding be comparison.
>
>I know that Joni Mitchell used the V-Guitar system to replace carrying 
>six 
>or eight guitars which required her tech to retune over the course the 
>evening.  A friend of mine saw one of those shows and said the results 
>were less than convincing to his ears, which is a shame.
>
>TravisH

I use a VG-88 and you're right about the dissonance, if the guitar is too 
acoustically alive. I drive my VG-88 with a semihollow archtop, and that's 
about as much natural acoustic response as I'd want. It's enough to get a 
little "woodiness" and "air" into the tone of the patches, but not so much 
that I'm hearing dissonance, or feeling an odd vibration against my body 
when the guitar is making different notes than those coming out of the 
speakers.

I also agree that the acoustic modeling in the VG-88 isn't that great, 
just 
"okay" for certain jobs.

I mostly use very clean, low distortion, "hi fi" electric guitar patches 
for my altered tuning and octave shifted tunes. It's sort of a Tuck 
Andress 
jazz guitar tone that doesn't sound as artificial as most of the acoustic 
patches. The one really good acoustic patch in the VG-88 (IMO) is the 
nylon 
string, which I think sounds at least as good as a typical piezo pickup on 
a solidbody nylon string like a Godin, or a Gibson Chet Atkins CE. 
Unfortunately the VG-88 doesn't let you do any pitch shifting on that 
nylon 
patch... probably because it's using up all the DSP to run the model.


Mike Barrs