poltr1 | Guitar synthesizers......

So here I was, in the car, listening to Pat Metheny's "We Live Here" CD. One of my favorite tracks on it is track 4: "To The End Of The World". It starts off with a nice bass riff, then the drums come in, then Pat comes in on guitar. Eventually, Lyle Mays chips in a nice piano solo. Then afterward, Pat comes back, soloing on guitar....or is it? It sounds more like some type of horn.

Now why would a guitar player want their axe to sound anything other than a guitar? Because guitars have a limited sound palette. (I often think of sounds as colors in the crayon box.) Guitars will nearly always sound like....guitars. Electric guitarists often add effects pedals and devices to change the sound somethat -- give it more fuzz or distortion, add a wah-wah pedal, digital delay, frequency shifting, even add a device to make it sounds like the guitar talks. ("Do you feel like I do?", asked Peter Frampton.)

So, if a guitar player has an idea for a solo, but wants it to sound like a flute, a trumpet, or a bagpipe, and they don't play that instrument, what then? Bring in someone to play that line? Or do something to the guitar sound to make it sound more like those instruments? Great guitar and keyboard soloists approach their instrument like a woodwind or brass horn.

Enter the guitar synthesizer. (Besides, why should keyboardists have all the fun with playing with sounds?)

Early guitar synths were based on analog technology. The problem was, the sound of each string wasn't isolated to each pickup, so there was a big problem of bleed-over. ARP Instruments came up with a hexaphonic pickup -- each string's pickup was shaped like a hexagon instead of a circle). But they sunk gobs of money into R&D to develop the ARP Avatar guitar synthesizer, more than they could ever recoup in sales. And the company went under, or came damn near close to it. (Let that be a lesson to the companies in Silicon Valley, lest the same fate befall them.)

In the early 1980s came MIDI -- Musical Instrument Digital Interface -- and digital technology, which essentially solved the problems experienced with analog technology. Instead of an analog signal coming from the guitar into the external synth electronics, a digital MIDI signal went into it, which made it much easier to process and filter out the "noise" from the surrounding strings.

Some guitarists embraced the technology; some were a little more reluctant. Guitar synth players I know of include Pat Metheny, Russ Freeman (of Russ Freeman and the Rippingtons), and Mark Dwane. Mark Dwane's music is an incredible electronic soundscape of nothing but overdubbed and multitracked MIDI guitar (he uses an Ibanez model specifically made for MIDI), and percussion. One of the guitar synths Pat Metheny uses is a Roland VG-8 -- actually, it's a "virtual guitar system" -- and puts it to good use on "The Roots Of Coincidence" -- track 7 of his "Imaginary Day" CD. There are several guitar sounds employed on the track, including fuzz to heavy-metal maximum overdrive to harmonic. All this without switching axes or having guitar ninjas on standby.

It's still a little discorientating to me to watch a guitarist play and hear something other than a guitar. But I'm starting to get used to it.