ASAT 3 spotting

[jwebsmall]

Starting at 1:24 in this you tube video:

[youtube]UbanUPHss60[/youtube]

the ASAT 3 is used extensively to demonstrate the SourceAudio
box.

SourceAudio is making some interesting FX boxes like
the multiband distortion (for bass especially) that allows
us guitar and bass players to close the gap with club/house
computer musicians giving new application to guitar/bass players.
The bass distortion box video is using a motion detection device
where the playing hand is moving without striking the bass string
giving a dubstep bass effect without synths!

Something that is likely to be big later this year IMO is
a hybrid pop-dance sub genre typified by Delta Heavy UK.

I've starting playing my guitar through plug-in synth filter sections
for some pretty cool effects. It would be nice with G&L artists could
push the envelop of guitar/synth music. Midi guitar really never took
off but there may be new ways to make this pop/club music where
guitar players are AWOL now. It's time to get guitarists back into
the club.

[louis cyfer]

i played around with the source audio stuff, and found it absolutely useless to me. but i have no interest in the pop/club music either.

[jwebsmall]

the UK pop/club and the K-Pop that is sweeping Asia now should have
an impact on the U.S. pop charts by early next year. The good
news is K-pop has more guitar work in their arrangements. Guitars
are nearly totally absent from European club music. Most K-pop
bands are all dancers but there are a few guitars-bass-drum k-pop
boy bands and they really good! It would be nice to see them with
some G&L guitars. Designer style finishes would go over big. This
market with India coming on line too is going to dwarf the U.S. guitar
market.

[jwebsmall]

My mother's cousin who passed away about 30 years ago owned
a music store and had 8 dance bands (called Lee Maxfield orchestras)
that worked hotels from Baltimore to Fredericksburg, Virginia. He was a horn player
who left home as a teenager to work as a musician on sea going
passenger ships. He eventually made enough money (after leaving
the ships) to put himself through college with a degree in music.
He arranged the music for his dance bands. He was always rather
frustrated with my playing guitar never understanding why I wasn't
interested in the horn. He would send me letters (people
used to hand write letters in the old days rather regularly)
and his return address label had a little motto under his address.
It read burn a guitar today. His dance bands didn't survive long
after he was gone (as the
Lawrence Welk generation died off or got to old to go out to
dancing. I think guitars are going to be around for a long time
to come but there is a mega shift going on in music right now
with the ascendency of computer musicians. DJ's are forming
bands and playing their midi controllers live. It's not just loops.
Some of these DJ bands are quartets. The drums are played live on midi
drum pads with their fingers. Some of this drumming is incredible
for dance grooves. If you haven't been to a club music scene it's
an eye/ear opener. My mother's cousin never came to
grip with the fact that the telecaster had changed the game.
After hearing telecasters in your face and then listening to a horn
section was kind of lame. The dance band didn't have a chance
- the electric guitar changed the world. This new music today is so in your face
when I listen to my guitar work in comparison my
chops pale in comparison - and amp modeling isn't going
to close the gap. When you've been through
a club "song" break down and then the drop (corresponds to
the pre chorus and chorus) it's an experience you won't
forget just like hearing that marshall amp when you first
played guitar. I think someone needs to figure out how
to get the guitar back into the mix. We're having
a British/European invasion all over again of club music. Guitars will fit
in the mix but not with the kind of chops we're used to.
We need another EVH or something equivalent to reinvent
the guitar parts and get into the act. I could see an ASAT/tele
player in the DJ quartet but not playing the way we are
used to playing. My mother's cousin's music store is long
gone - he refused to sell guitars. I'm working with two club
acts now trying to find a place for guitar in the mix. My
synth skills is the only reason I'm in the mix now. But I'm trying
to come up with guitar parts. The hardest rock is lame compared
to a drop IMO. We need something in technique or in the signal
chain to get back into the main stream act. Since I've gotten
with the synths I've got women half my age asking me to take
them to the club. I'm not bragging - they're are just so few
young guys who are into that scene. I love my guitars. Playing
my guitars I only got women in their 50's coming out of the wood
work (I'm 60.) I want to get the guitars back into the Pop/dance scene so I can wipe
that grin off my mother's cousin who's in sonic heaven saying
you see I was right - burn your guitar. Maybe we need to
mount a Kaos pad onto the SC-2. I'm going to try anything.

[timewave]

POP/ CLUB ??? You need a gtr. to play that? What is POP/CLUB ? Thought all you would need for that is a drum mach. and a synth.!

[jwebsmall]

Yes all you need is a computer and midi controllers.

Another local grocery chain 6 months carried
at least 3 different electric guitarist magazines.
Today they don't stock any.

Hopefully this doesn't signify an end of an era.

[KenC]

Maybe we need to
mount a Kaos pad onto the SC-2. I'm going to try anything.

Check out old Devo videos and you can find an SC-2 rigged with a ring mod. Yep, an Electro Harmonix Frequency Analyzer duct taped right on there. It wasn't "pop/club", but we danced to it. Well, we jerked and twiched around to it, without moving our feet. At least that's what the cool kids did.

Back in the late 90s you couldn't pick up a copy Bass Player that didn't have at least one letter, editorial or article warning that the electric bass was doomed to disappear by 2010 due to the appearance of modeling effects for guitars and midi synths. I have yet to see a guitarist laying down a convincing bass part through a modeling amp, or any attempt at a walking line by a keyboard player that doesn't sound just plain cheesy. It just doesn't translate off of the real basses.

I admit to listening to a bit of loop-based music, and I own a copy of Ableton (the standard software for the kind of "DJ bands" you mentioned, in case others aren't familiar). Aside from the rhythms it's all about oscillators, preferably lots of oscillators interacting with each other. From direct experience and research for the next pedal purchase, here are some starting points for investigating useful sounds:

1. Moog's MF-102 Ring Modulator: Forget the usual ring mod sounds, which this pedal happens to do very well. The heart of it is two low-frequency oscillators (LFOs) that can play off each other and give pulses of volume in the range that amp tremolos usually run. Tweak it, and you can get stuttering, warbling bursts under your guitar part. Of course, you have to work your tempo and duration of notes around the settings you've selected on the pedal. This one also works extremely well as a tremolo pedal.

2. Moog's MF-105 or MF-105M MURF (Multiple Resonance Filter Array): I don't own this one yet, but it basically mixes a bank of filters with modulation.

3. Moog's MF-107M Analog Delay: I haven't played this one yet, but it combines delay with several modulation waveforms. I own the previous version (which didn't have modulation) and the MF-108M Cluster Flux (which used the same modulation with a shorter delay time), and expect the MF-107M would pair them very nicely.

4. Just about anything from CoPilot FX: I own one CoPilot pedal, the Antenna, which is sort of a ring mod/bit crusher. It wouldn't be a silver bullet for what you want to do, but some of their other products look promising. In particular their Dubscope, Gyroscope and Molecule pedals are designed specifically for letting guitars and basses get a variety of techno sounds. There are samples on their website.

In case you haven't checked out the British music magazine The Wire, it reviews a lot of new music that touches on what you're talking about. The articles cover much more than that, but three times a year a CD is included with the magazine. These CDs tend to focus on electronica, drones and noise, all of which could easily cross over to more enlightened techno styles. There is a surprising amount of guitar on these CDs.

I would agree that traditional guitar soloing wouldn't have a place in this kind of music. Sustained tones or chords with a lot of modulation could though. Assuming you've found a sound that can blend with your bandmates, have you tried letting one of them sample your guitar live as you lay chords or long tones over their groove? Especially if you have your original signal being twisted and bounced around by nice juicy analog processors...

Ken

[jakkanen]

I would agree that traditional guitar soloing wouldn't have a place in this kind of music. Sustained tones or chords with a lot of modulation could though. Assuming you've found a sound that can blend with your bandmates, have you tried letting one of them sample your guitar live as you lay chords or long tones over their groove? Especially if you have your original signal being twisted and bounced around by nice juicy analog processors...

Ken

I don't even know what kind of music you're talking about, can you give me some names so I can get on Youtube and hear for myself?

This does sound interesting to me in principle, although I doubt this is the kind of music I'd b interested in getting into. But who knows? I'd be perfectly happy to play chords and tones all night long. What I dislike about traditional guitar soloing is that 1) what guitarists tend to play, and what seems to be expected is pretty trite, and 2) I for one am unable to express anything meaningful in the space of eight measures. Give me three choruses and I'll tell a story. But who wants to hear that?

I had seen Source Audio demos before and I really dig some of the sounds. I got an Amazon gift card as a reward for something I did at work and ordered a Multiwave DIstortion box yesterday. I am really looking forward to some new tones.

A friend of mine got an EH micro synth for his birthday and that might go on my Christmas list yet. I am slighlty undecided about it at the moment.

[jwebsmall]

My favorites at the moment are remixes from Delta Heavy UK:

[youtube]EXSn-Vy8nj8[/youtube]
[youtube]SpjaylPk5bw[/youtube]

This are particularly instructive because they remix conventional
pop songs which are more melodic than loop music generally. They
don't demonstrate guitar parts - that's not my point here - but rather
they demonstrate that the more melodic can coexist with the dance,
club, house beats. In other words guitars making new sounds have
a place in the unfolding of dance, club and house beats!

I'm not trashing guitars or basses. I just want to explore
new ways to use them in 21st century mixes. Midi guitar
didn't really catch on so far. But if we were playing some
of this latest synth or effects I think they most definitely have
a place.

Our regular playing skills do not directly fit in this new kind of music. The
reason is something I call the "animation space". In traditional music
melody animates the music. Arpeggiation is another means to achieve
"animation". And of course traditional harmony cadences are a kind of
slower evolving animation. In computer based music with loops
any "animated permutations" have to come back around so that loops
can be concatenated together (with time stretching beat matching and/or
pitch morphing). This limits the music dramatically hence the need to
"amp up" the animation space. This is accomplished with something
I call "groove contours" and harmony content animation (e.g. the LFO's
of dubstep). But this back fill of the animation space particularly the groove contours
(not just the percussion but also the percussive leading shapes of the
harmonic content) hog the animation space and crowd out traditional
melodic, harmony cadence and traditional drum patterns. If you have
ever played with synth patches the first thing you'll notice is how fast
the mix space if filled to the brim and turned to mud. Hence the animation
moves to the groove contours to punch through. If we
try to step into the mix we are lost because of these dynamics. This
is why I find the DeltaHeavyUK innovation worthy of study. Because
it is being to solve some of the loop music's problems bringing it back
to the more melodic.

The later Muse (band) music (manson guitar) and others mention in
the other post have stepped out in this direction before. But we can
do much better now in just the last year because of the advances
in the synth plugin technology. But you can't just pick up a moog
guitar and make it work in the mix mostly because the mix arrangement
is not reworked to deal with the realities of the animation space and
groove contours.

This is a golden opportunity to figure out what works and what won't
and step in perhaps with a hacked up tribute guitar with kaos pad or
whatever (I don't want to hack up a USA G&L when I don't know what
I'm doing). I'm not just talking about making another Roland v-guitar.
Those traditional thinking about synths aren't where its at.
We need to think inside the box to make out of the box music with
guitars and basses. For example multiple pads / controls on the guitar
could control the drums & bass LFO's. Let's get creative and strap
on a midi pad/knob control X/Y pad - whatever and break down and
drop and stop being wall flowers rehashing the same old same old.
After all the DJ's are finding they have to move towards the quartet
model - let's get there first and cut them off at the pass! Some
guitarist is going to do it. Let's make it happen with a G&L.

[KenC]

This does sound interesting to me in principle, although I doubt this is the kind of music I'd b interested in getting into.

You hit the nail on the head! A lot of it is more interesting in principle than in practice. A lot of what you'll hear is not very inspired or very good. It can get a room dancing, though.

I don't even know what kind of music you're talking about, can you give me some names so I can get on Youtube and hear for myself?

There are a lot of different things that could fall under this general heading. Most of it, IMO, is generic and pretty much a waste of time to listen to (it is for dancing rather than listening, after all). You can probably get a sense of the majority of club/dance music by Googling the names of some different genres: techno, drum 'n' bass, dubstep, trance, jungle, and house.

There are some very thoughtful musicians working around the edges of these styles, and some of the biggest influences on club music over the past thirty years have either featured or used guitars and electric basses. Here are a couple of starting points I would suggest:

1. New Order - They didn't invent club music, but they definitely shaped it in the early days and created some of its biggest "hits". Try their songs Blue Monday or Bizarre Love Triangle.

2. Stereolab - They put out a lot of material in the 90s and early 00s before calling it quits, and their style varied over that time. I think they have gotten back together.

3. Portishead - A British band known for a style called "trip hop". They were big in the 90s, and have started getting active again.

4. Phantogram - I don't know much about them. I came across a session of theirs on Moog's website. They seem to mix loops and drum machines with live guitar, synth and vocals.

5. Squarepusher - A solo act from Britain. Not my favorite, but he has been a pretty major act over the last couple of years. Plays a fretless bass over loops and drum machines.

Most of this is older stuff, but it's stood the test of time and is still influential. It's not what you would probably hear 99.9% of the time in most dance clubs, but I think it illustrates that modern, danceable music can have a place for guitars. You might also find some interesting examples on the Sound Lab page at MoogMusic.com.

Ken

A friend of mine got an EH micro synth for his birthday and that might go on my Christmas list yet. I am slighlty undecided about it at the moment.

I got a Micro Synth a couple of years ago and find that I rarely use it. The fact that it isn't polyphonic really limits its use in my playing. I do like it for a very mangled square wave distortion.

Ken

[jwebsmall]

I like Phantogram a lot - thanks for the tip.

Squarepusher was more what I had in mind
but this of course is dated.

[KenC]

The situation you describe reminds me of playing bass with a rhythm guitarist who only knows full barre chords and plays them four-to-the-bar with distortion. It may be what some songs call for, but it leaves no room for anything on bass besides thumping out root notes along with him or going way up the neck to a different register. If the group sets boundaries around each member's "space", in terms of pitch and density, it should be able to work out.

Ken

[Aussie]

[youtube]S2W0ELBius4[/youtube]

[louis cyfer]

[youtube]S2W0ELBius4[/youtube]

is that like guitar hero?

[timewave]

NO Louis, GTR ZERO!

[louis cyfer]

NO Louis, GTR ZERO!

i meant like the video game. push a few buttons and pretend to be a guitar player.

[jwebsmall]

This is close to what I had in mind. Except I was going to mount the pressure
pads and slide midi control film directly onto the guitar body.

Acoustic guitar players tap out rhythm on their guitar bodies now - it doesn't
make them less of a guitar player. EVH wasn't afraid to hack up a guitar.
Nothing risked nothing gained.

I'm going start looking for a used Tribute ASAT to hack up and make into
a USB freak guitar.

[KenC]

I'm going start looking for a used Tribute ASAT to hack up and make into
a USB freak guitar.

I look forward to seeing your progress!

Ken

[timewave]

Thats what I was talking about Louis! Gtr Zero! pretending to play gtr. I think its a shame that these kids are even doing this gtr hero crap if they spent that time on a REAL Gtr. they would prob be good REAL gtr. players!!

[timewave]

[youtube]S2W0ELBius4[/youtube]

Im not getting one of these ! EVER!!

[jwebsmall]

I agree the guitar playing in the first video is rather lame.

But this same Gtr Zero in this video starting at 1:25 shows this
guy can play guitar alright as well as most.

[youtube]kGM8T-u5jik[/youtube]

The point is he can play with DJ's in club scenes or at any
frat party and fit right in. He has sonic currency.

Once I got my style and rig developed I'll post something
in the general discussion forum.

I'm currently working on accompanying a singer/songwriter
who does open mic nights but on a lap top synth and drum
machine. Once I get that duet nailed I hope to integrate the
guitar into the computer musician type of gig. I've got one
open mic night venue agreeing to allow the lap top with the
acoustic guitarist - singer. Normally it is closed to anything
but acoustic guitar. It's a sports bar and if it doesn't flop
I'll be on my way.

[Aussie]

Hey John. Have you lookked at any of the Manson Guitars. They don't have dicital effects built in but do have a contol pad benind the bridge which can drive and external Kaoss or midi device
cheers, Robbie

[youtube]po1ojCMBjPs[/youtube]

[NickHorne]

Isn't a guitar always going to be a really inappropriate device for controlling synthetic / sampled sounds? Even the touch-sensitivity we use and love has more to it than just level changes.
While a keyboard is a poor device for controlling guitar sounds. Double-stop bends, anyone??
And computer-based music doesn't actually need any performance controller, in the orthodox sense, at all. Although it does enable the creator to get timing "interestingly" wrong and horrible, without having to unlearn their playing ability / disengage their nervous system first.
I'm just really pleased to see Ry Cooder selling truckloads of records, honestly made minus contrived marketing content, ditto Tommy Emmanuel, and also younger players on the pop front e.g. Laura Marling (yes, she really has a guitar talent and awareness) etc etc.
As the "music" (i.e. record) industry of the last few decades continues to fizzle out, the guitar seems to be surviving quite well in the modern leaner-and-cleaner economics of pro music.
The sales (and quality) of instruments for keen amateur players look better than ever.
And let's remember that Les Paul's mum advised him to use the guitar instead of the piano, with the deeply sensible advice that "no-one can see you behind a piano".....
Don't think our stringed friend is going to fade away anytime soon.
Oh yes... and don't neglect to SUPPORT G&L!! Proper guitars at proper prices, which are also "minus contrived marketing content"!

[jwebsmall]

Hey Aussie,

thanks for the link to the manson guitar!

As the X/Y pads advance (multi-touch detection)
they can not only emulate virtual trems and flloyds
but they will be able to do double bends, tapping, etc.
Adding an X/Y pad to a guitar in the 21st century
is really not all that different than adding a trem
onto a tele and calling it a strat in the 1950's.

The X/Y pad was made for an ASAT style guitar!

I"m spending a lot of time these days with synths
like Massive, Sylenth, Zebra2, Blue, Predator, Elektra,
etc. and exploring mixes with guitar. I"m also working
with Maschine and Geist. Getting the beats, synth
pads and guitar working together in a mix is really
changing my song writing craft. One promising
mix (not ready to be heard yet) I have an tele
country twang blending with an ubran beat and
an electric 5 string bass. It's a riot but I haven't
solved all problems yet. The problems are basically
establishing a groove pocket and dovetailing the
parts into this pocket. Also the chorus instead of
being a climax is going to be a dub step drop and
I"m doing some pulls and slides along the low
E-string of the guitar - again not working yet
but strangely different.

[huck]

My head is spinning! 40 years of practice down the drain...lol?

[NickHorne]

Just a different part of the universe, I guess.
Though the analogy with amplifying a guitar and then adding a vibrato bar is hard to ignore!
But it's not my kind of time / reward ratio. Get the players together, play the music, and there it is: done.
Multitrack sometimes encouraged fiddling about down rabbit holes, and ProTools makes it almost irresistable, but I find it a pretty irritating and uncreative way to spend time, either way. Having to invent the waveform on the hoof as well would have me in clinical depression.
Listeners mostly don't really care about the instruments. It can sometimes seem obvious to us that they should, but they don't. What they really care about is whether or not they like the music. Simply that. And if the music contains good energy, chances are a lot of people will like it a lot. My (older guy's) view is that some people will also like it if it contains a lot of marketing-type writing / sonic design, even if its emotional life is a bit one-dimensional, but it will be fewer people, and their enjoyment will be less.
After a lifetime in pro sound, I came to my conclusion that music has two life-forms: one as a consumer product / commerce accessory (industry, TV or ads), and the other as a social recreation / artform / bit of joy / dance engine etc. Can't be too hard to guess which one has the place in my affections. But hang on.. Dance Engine?? did we just meet that "other stuff" coming the other way? Can't be bad then!

[jwebsmall]

Rock started out questioning the status quo. When that stops rock dies.

[Submersible]

Stereolab started out as a krautrock band (first few albums sounds just like Neu!) and later branched out to lounge and other styles. I think they processed guitars through a small modular synth rig--probably an EMS?

Portishead is interesting because the guitar parts are often quite conventional, but on the albums, they had dub plates made of some of the guitar lines and had the DJ fly them back in on turntables.

[KenC]

I picked up a magazine devoted to electronic music last weekend. It was the first issue, and tried to cover the history of electronic dance music from the 70s to the present. There weren't many pictures with guitars in them, but two of that handful showed G&Ls: an SC-2 with Devo, and an L-1000 with the Human League.

Ken

[jwebsmall]

http://www.musictechmag.co.uk/mtm/featu ... erformance

Controllerism is finding it's way into bands and even
solo and duets. It may start out as the artist merely controlling
their lighting or backing tracks or the DJ that composes
on the fly or maybe the singer/songwriter duet one playing an acoustic
guitar while the other his iPhone/iPad. Midi musicians are coming into their own
and the article above acknowledges that controllerism is a
new kind of musicianship "and that these controllers
really are instruments of a new kind, and after watching
some of the better performances it's a view that's hard
to argue with."

Wikipedia even has a page for Controllerism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controllerism

[youtube]fGLRSl2i4Mo[/youtube]

With the rush to get controllers out there there should
be some that can be strapped onto guitars.

The two closest Best Buy stores to me had musical instrument
departments (selling mostly guitar and secondly electronic
drum kits). One store closed their music department
last month - all the guitars and drums are gone. The other one
told me today they are closing as soon as the store gets
it's next remodeling. The drums are gone, the guitar
racks are thinning out and they are back filling with DJ
club controllers, etc. because that's selling better at least.
Even so the department will be gone when the store is
remodeled.

My mother's cousin owned a music store and had 8
dance band units that played hotel/club gigs from Baltimore
to Frederickburg, Virginia that he arranged the music for having
a degree in music composition. In the 1960's he would send me
letters with a return sticker that said burn a guitar today.
He was trying to get me to give up my learning the guitar
and embrace the dance band era music. He died before
he saw the demise of his bands. I don't want to make
the same mistake he make in refusing to embrace the
next wave of music instrument evolution. The electric
guitar to him was just too radical and not really music
as far as he was concerned. He thought the telecaster
was bringing on the destruction of music. But Leo
knew one telecaster with a tube amp could rival a brass
section. The telecaster didn't destroy music but it arguably
did help bring an end to the big band era, perhaps that is
what he feared.

Today a controllerist can rival a drummer, bass and keyboard
player! Controllerists don't want to be sitting behind a computer.
If we can put controllers on guitar we can extend their
life span into the modern pop club perhaps. My mother's
cousin didn't want to play rock concerts - he could have made
a heck of a lot more money if he had.

I think the ASAT is the perfect platform to experiment with
some kind of controller because in the flat top holes can
be drilled into it for housing stuff in the body. A Tribute
would be the ideal experimental platform and also for
market research! In other words a tribute ASAT as
a controller - not the typical guitar synth controller.
I think the Gibson Firebird and Robot guitar just don't
get it. They are trying to retro fit the internal combustion
engine so to speak instead of embracing the new jet engine.

Leo's first love was tinkering with electronics. I would like
to think if he were alive today and doing R&D at G&L he would
be already way ahead of the game trying to retrofit an ASAT with
controllers and maybe even talking with DJ musicians who are
performing or at least contact that guy above who strapped
on those controller buttons onto his guitar. Leo was a visionary
who thought outside of the band box.

[jwebsmall]

DJ'ing with live drummer.

[youtube]eCmNeSrS0U4[/youtube]

Now we need to have a guitarist playing with the DJ in the club.

Moldover is doing it here with a guitar but you don't hear the guitar
in the video. But you do see the buttons mounted into a guitar
that looks like a morphed tele knock off.

[youtube]wB-S3OSQBVg#![/youtube]

Here he's trying again with a conventional e-guitar but the performance
is poor:

[youtube]04zrcQKIODM[/youtube]

This performance is slightly better.

[youtube]MXQsMBuAiMI[/youtube]

I still think an ASAT with buttons on it is act waiting to happen.
The music has to be arranged/invented that provides a natural
synergy between club music and guitar.