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I think Rainer brings a new perspective into this discussion (quote below). It's about morphing the guitar into the domain traditionally dominated by synths (ADSR envelope, touch control, velocity etc). Applying an Envelope Follow is quite new, but applying a volume pedal may equally bring it home, if played accurately. Terje Rypdal comes to mind here, using a volume pedal to make a wildly ripping distortion sound gain a singing melodic character. Jerry Garcia developed a custom solution by omitting the guitar's volume knob and feed his guitar pickup output directly into the fuzzbox pedal on the floor. Then he brought back the fuzzbox output into the guitar on a second cable loop to run it through his guitar's volume knob before going to the amp/speaker. This was a way of "applying volume pedal functionality to his guitar knob". I know I would love that in a Strat because I play a lot with the guitar's volume knob and am also a bit sad that this leaves out those overly distorted NiN sounds, unless you customize you guitar according to the Jerry Garcia trick. Haven't done that yet though. This leads to another technical aspect of guitar tone (not to be confused with opinion on artistic output, referring to Kris post) which is the guitar being a plucked string instrument - like the piano, the harp etc. This mean that once you have plucked a string the note will keep on vibrating according to the envelope implied by the instrument's phsycial/mechanical resonance characteristics. There's not much you can to to add expression to the tone once the string is plucked (at least not compared to singing or playing wind instruments). Gadgets to give the guitar more of this continuous tone expression are the wha pedal, talkbox, sustainer and distortion (even though distortion doesn't give much more control, it just messes with the natural envelope of the instrument). Oh, I almost forgot acoustic/mechanic feedback through the air, pioneered by Jimi Hendrix. Then we should of course also mention legato style distortion players like Alan Holdsworth. I took to yet another method in order to gain a continuous control of tone expression by multi sampling my favorite strat plying it through my Sovtek/Marshall setup and building a dynamically morphing sample patch to blow with an EWI. You loose some dimensions of physical guitar playing but you win a lot of in terms of tone expression. If anyone is curious what that sounds like, listen for the floating twang bar strat sound at www.ubetoo.com/Artist.taf?_ArtistId=6550 in "The Yogi and the Commissar". Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Rainer Straschill <moinsound@googlemail.com> wrote: > One thing I found to work rather > nicely when playing those hugely overloaded fuzz/crunch sounds is to > use an envelope follower on your input signal and use that to modulate > the output level of the distortion effect. With that, you get a "goes > to eleven" sound all the time, which still reacts in volume to your > playing.