the coloring of the guitar (add to: live looping amplification)

[Matthias Grob <matthias@grob.org>]

a point I forgot about Guitar amplifying:

a guitar amp has character. Thats great. There is more spirit in it 
than in a PA somehow. Technically this is mostly resonances and some 
other kinds of distortion. Filters can also flatten attacks and 
correct instrument failures.
But they mostly stay the same for all sounds and each layer of the loop!

Dont you want to express your thing in the first place?
You have a lot of character just by the way you pluck the strings, 
phrase and tune.
I found those things come through better when there is not too much 
other character. I dont vote for dead stuff at all, but just see how 
far you want to go. A steelstring is a heavy limitation and has 
strong character to start with, and then it goes through n steps 
until the roomcharacter...

picture:
its hard to project a colorful picture through a sequence of colored 
lenses.

In other words:
I would not want to make a plublic listen to a guitar with a guitar 
amp for a whole night. It may sound great and fill a space in a band 
well, but on a more neutral speaker system you manage to give a more 
balanced sound spectrum to the public, a full massage, so to speak :-)

We can work out a system which is loud enough for most places without 
PA, light, quickly controlable, and can bring most of the basic sound 
types like:
heavy, clear, bright, singing, aggressive, smooth, soft, dark, 
stressy, romantic, happy,,, we can produce them with our fingers on 
the strings, but by adding the right effect, we enhance and sum up a 
multicolor picture.
And in many places they love you because you play so low - while you 
do not necessarily play with less total volume, but with less 
resonances and a more spread sound spectrum!

Some listeners say: ohh, you can do flutes and celos and caverns and 
snowfields and whatnot - it does not sound so similar to me - no such 
intention - but its stimulating associations!
- one of the ways we can help people :-)
-- 


          ---> http://Matthias.Grob.org