Guitar Synth: What is it?

Ergonomic Alien Shred

Soooo Yeah, Guitar Synth.  What goes through your head when you hear that.  Do you think of an insane guitar like device played in an 80’s electropop band?  Or lounge singer who needs his guitar to sound like a flute for the intro to the Titanic theme?

 That’s what a lot of players think of synth guitar.  The fact is it can really be anything you want it to be. You can use real sound synthesis to give your playing a new vocabulary without ever sounding like a penny whistle if you don’t want to.  Synthesizer players have been creating tones from the ground up for years on their keyboards.  Why should you miss out?

Today I’ll talk about what I consider to be the three main categories of things that people mean when they say “Synth Guitar”:

Electro-Harmonix Hog Guitar Synth

Serious Sound Design

Pigtronix MothershipSynth Effects Pedals:   These are usually effects pedals that take your normal guitar signal and add synth-like characteristics such as multiple octaves, pitch gliding, square-like distortion and filtering effects.  Many players like these because they can blend these into their existing effects without the use of a special pick up.  Analog lovers will most likely prefer these for retaining purity and feel.

Wait, what?

  Data-Converting Guitar Synths:  Systems like these sense action in your strings, usually pitch, and convert that into digital information, usually midi, into synthesizers and samplers.  These usually require that you plug into a converter box or use a special pick-up to “talk” to the synth.  There are systems that have their own synthesizer and others that allow you to control external synths as well as software VSTs.



Guitarish Looking Controllers:  These things definitely get the hardest beating from players.  First of all, they are not really guitars at all.  The “fretboards” are typically made of sensors, often buttons, that for the most part follow the typical guitar layout.  The “plucking” area can be everything from mock string sensors to a touchscreen interface.  There are usually an array of controls on the “body” of these things.  Drum pads, fake trems and levers.  Maybe the hardest to love but I’d like to mess around with one.

This dude is sooo getting laid post show.

Wireless Synth Guitar!!!

Wow!  Now this appears to be some progress in the realm of synth guitar.  Fishman has teamed up with András Szalay, who designed Axon’s legendary guitar midi technology, to bring us Triple Play Wireless Guitar Controller.
   
Like the Roland’s GK line of divided pick ups, the Triple Play uses the similar design of a hexaphonic pick up and controller that attach to your guitar.  Instead of a midi cable, your signal is transmited by wireless usb to a small usb recier that looks sort of like a memory stick.
Axon was known for there Superior tracking and this compact unit is said to provide it.  Now a guitarist can control software and hardware synths as well as ios apps.  It comes with software that works with most major daws and devices and can perform some great “Hold” functions such as looping, sustain and arpeggiators.  The attached video is pretty corny but the tracking is pretty spot on!
The controller itself is very thin and comes with a rechargeable lithium ion battery. 

Fishman Triple Play

The Triple Play is said to be released June 2012 and is rumored to be under $300.  The price could put in in the hands of many guitar synth newbies.  Roland needs a little competition.

Shredder Guitar Synth for ios

It was only a matter of time until somebody made a stab at a guitar synth for ios.  Enter
Yonac Software’s Shredder synth for guitar.
The first thing that makes this cool is the fact that it does not use samples but FM/Subtractive  synthesis to create tones from “scratch”.

The second plus is that it works from you magnetic guitar pick ups and not some special pick up that you have to attach to your guitar.  To help the tracking along, you can dial in the sweet spot on your guitar with the Input Sensitivity and Decay Threshold sliders.   It is however, monophonic but let’s cut it some slack for only being $14.99.  Besides, some of the greatest analog synths ever made were monophonic as well.  

This thing speaks midi!  Ins and outs.  You can control the parameters with an external midi device or control a virtual or hardware synth with your guitar.  Hmm...Guitar +Shredder+ Dave Smith Mopho= Analog guitar synth on the cheap!  

Although it’s monophonic, each note can be assigned chords to each note that can be changed on the fly using the Chordmaker feature.  You can even send this data to external synths.  

It even comes with virtual stompboxes to warp your sound even more.
You can also mix your “normal” guitar signal with Shredder to create huge, complex tones.  
Also included is a “Hold” feature that will sustain a note or chord that you can then play over similar to Electroharmonix Freeze pedal.

• No synth pickup needed: works via guitar adapter or mic (best in quiet settings w/ amplified electric or regular acoustic guitar, if using mic)
• FM/Subtractive fully programmable hybrid synth engine w/ dedicated FM envelope
• Dual individually configurable LFOs with 7 waveforms each
• 3-Pass custom resonant filter
• Dedicated filter, amp and FM ADSR envelopes
• Built in oscilloscope
• 16 channel virtual MIDI out
• MIDI in for playing w/ external controller
• Configurable MIDI CC map
• Glide and Noise
• Ring Modulation
• Virtual Pedalboard
• Audio Recording and Sharing (Audio Paste, WiFi, or Email)
• 100+ awesome presets
• Save any number of your own synth presets
• On-screen keyboard
• Built-in tuner

Available at the iTunes store for $14.99.