AcmeBarGig Forums

I must say I was surprised to see a korg synth figuring amoungst the gear collections here at ABG.

Synth Development is going to fast become a priority...There is no question of that...Its been months since I said that but it is a major focus. I have just been off and on working on a Karplus Synth...Dave and I have been speaking about Synths a lot more lately too...We will not just be a guitar company...
KM

I havn't seen any really good tracking guitar/bass synths other than the one included in guitar rig , any thought in doing one of those?

I'm not familiar with it...whats it do?
KM

its pretty much a clone of this pedal The board requires you to be registered and logged in to view links.
another cool pedal of theirs that has synth capability The board requires you to be registered and logged in to view links.

I guess those are still guitar related but somewhat synthy

Very cool...I should add one of them..

Edit..I stopped short of adding all the functions of this thing...I added to octavers though, one in pedal form and one in GhettoBass form(Rack)
KM

I think these are essentially "audio triggered synths". There are a few VST examples, although I have not persoanally experimented with any of them.

You supply the audio (guitar, piano, humming...) the VST detects the pitch of the incoming audio and outputs its own synth sounds at the same pitch.
Essentially this is a guitar tunner (pitch detecting code) coupled with a VST synth.

What I would like to see:

1) I think an audio to midi VST is very useful (there are a couple of those too) as this will give you th epossibility of driving any VST synth from your guitar, humming, etc. You can also feed it a recorded melody and have the VST replace that with it's own synth...

2) I think there is a lot of potential for effects which detect the pitch of the incoming audio and then apply effects based on the detected pitch. Some ideas:
- AM/FM: the effect's internal oscilator is driven by the detected pitch and then used to amplitude modulate or frequency modulate the audio.
- Bit rate: bit rate reducers are usually quite un-musical. Some notes might sound nice, but most sound like horrible digital distortion. The notes that sound nice have a frequency that is a multiple of the bit rate (or close to it). So having a bit rate reducer whrere the bit rate is driven by the pitch of the incoming audio material would be very interesting.
- Dis-harmonizer: At the other end of the spectrum, you could do the opposite and use the incoming audio frequency to tune a comb filter so that all the harmonics are removed. So only the un-harmonic contents remains...
- Sub oscilators: Want the extra low end? Use pitch recogntion to drive an osc playing one or two octaves below the source audio and then mix it with the original material...

Of course, all of the above, are normally limited to monophonic material. Polyphonic pitch recognition is still in its infancy, even more so for real-time VST applications...

No those pedals are 100% audio effects...It seems like they are triggered but they're not...All those effects are easily doable and when applied to an audio stream give the effect of a synth...
I mean you have an octaver, a filter, and a clipper...thats it..They say Square wave in the video but what he is really saying is that the wave has been squared through clipping..like a big muff..

I think thats what you were talking about, unless you were talking about the VST effects, in which case Yeah you're right..haha...But I have never seem an audio triggered MIDI interface that works correct..Even in terms of hardware...not the special pickups though, they work pretty good...
KM

Maybe you are right, Ken. I do not have personal experince of using any of these sound-to-midi or audio triggered VST synths.

As a composing tool I am sure they are awsome. I mean, something that works 90% of the time is still going to save you a lot of work 'programming' a piece of music if you can just whistle or hum it to your computer rather than having to play it on a keyboard or 'program' it. If you end up having to correct the odd note here and there that is probably still a good tool to have, especially as an audio-to-midi tool since editing the midi clips is very easy.

Of course, live performance would be a different matter. Then it has to work 100% of the time.

Humming is still ptobably the best type of audio input to drive these things (our voice is, after all, monophonic).
A guitar is much more tricky. All it takes is an overlap with a tail from the previous note to confuse the algorythms and spit out the wrong note...

As with many other things we have seen in recent years. The interest is there and the technology will eventually catch up.

Speaking of monophonic voices...there is a vocal technique called "Kargyraa"..The singers produce 3 distinct notes with their voice at once...
Here's an example
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This site tells you how to do it...
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There was a yoddeler from the US that was the first to ever use the technique in a commercial song but I could not find an example of that...
KM