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March 2002
Posts: 873
Location: puerto vallarta, mexico | does anyone else here use a hexaphonic pickup to play synth guitar. any ovations out there that have beed adapted to this style of pickup?
i often wonder if the ovation pickup with 6 piezos could be wired to work as a hexaphonic through the 13 pin setup roland uses.
i fixed up an old breadwinner that had been modified by the previous owner beyond collectors value, and installed a hexaphonic pickup with outboard control unit (gk2a). i find it to be a great synth and cosm guitar, especially because it has a great 2 octave neck. looks the part too in its gothic black finish. |
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May 2004
Posts: 2850
Location: Midland, MI | I haven't/don't and don't know that I've heard of any Os being used that way. I'd like, at some much later date given the current family situation, to play with it. Then again, I'd like to get the Yammy woodwind thingy to hook up to my Motif. :)
How is the tracking on your Breadweiner/gk2a? Hey, speaking of COSM, didn't Roland/Boss make a multifx pedal built on COSM? Hrmm... |
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Posts: 873
Location: puerto vallarta, mexico | tracking with the gk2a ig good. it seems to depend more on the synth or cosm unit. that used to be the drawback to guitar synthesis, but now that there id better tracking and processing of the signal, some feel the guitar will become a popular synth instrument because of its expression capabilities over a keyboard.
i have a roland vg 88 v2 and a gr33. they are very flexible and highly progamable with midi in and out. i am just starting to learn a little about all of this but it is really interesting. you can program each string to do a different combination of things/sounds and mix or not mix them with the guitar's normal sounds, clean or through a processor. i saw a guy named steven king who works for taylor at a fingerpicking workshop this summer. he had a seperate pickups for his e and a strings and ran them through an octaver to play bass sounds to accompany his melody line played on d g b e strings. with the synth or cosm, you can do this too, but a zillion other things as well.
i really find the ability to change the tone of pitch of the string amazing. if i an open tuning or alternate tuning i program the unit to play it and at the touch of a footswitch i can go back and forth between the way the guitare is actually tuned and any other tuning i want. want a slide lead in the middle of a blues tune you are picking in standard tuning----stomp and voila! and then stomp, and back again. so far i have gigged with it playing slide, and when i don't feel like switching guitars all night. the amp and cabinet models are goob from my unsophisticated knowledge of them all.
it is fun to play with but not really all that cheap yet. my neighbors asked me how i know how to play so many instruments after i fooled around for several hours with the many different instrument patches. technique to match the original instruments capability is crucial to a real sound as you dont bend or slide or play multiple notes (polyphony) with certain instruments or sounds. still a long way to go but the most interesting new musical thing i have played around with in several years. |
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January 2002
Posts: 14127
Location: 6 String Ranch | Russ,
Way back in the beginning when there was Arp synths they used a deacon for the Avitar which was their idea of a synth guitar. Of course it failed totally. The Roland unit seems to be the one that works the best so I'm glad it's working for you. |
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March 2003
Posts: 127
Location: Corvallis, OR | I have a few comments about the Roland products that might be of general interest, and maybe I can save someone the trouble of discovering what I learned the hard way.
I have owned and played the Roland 33 and 88 , and altho I had lots of fun with them,(I was using a Godin 13 pin hexaphonic type guitar at the time) I would NOT recommend them to a finger style player, because they all have trouble with 1- hammer ons, 2- pull offs and 3- slides. These left hand tricks confound these units, and the results are hard to control.
And by the way, the VG 88 is not a true synthesizer - it is a guitar processor (Altho the first press blurbs about this unit strongly suggested that it was a synthesizer.)In addition, I have spent hours and hours trying to utilize the so called pitch shifter feature on the 88, and the most I can say for it is " it is a barely passable feature, under the best of circumstances." In fact, the factory no longer emphasizes this option, because it simply doesnt work well.
In addition, most of the various sounds you can get from these units are great for rock, jazz or any music that might sound good with distortion . But , alas, if you play so-called alternating bass finger style, the result is not good - you wind up with a garbled and unpleasant sound. Therefore, only about ten percent of the available patches on these units sound good with traditional American finger style music.
Lastly, the technology has really improved over the years, and the Roland 33 is the best tracking guitar accesory I have ever tried. I would not reccomend any of the earliest synthesizers because of latency problems. And bad manuals. And illogical confusing procedures and programming techniques.
Felix |
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March 2002
Posts: 873
Location: puerto vallarta, mexico | i can't believe i just typed about a dozen paragraphs and lost it all trying to insert a few links.
thanks for the info bill. i'd like to see a photo of that ovation synth guitar. could be i have the only breadwinner set up like this.
felix, i agree with some of what you say, but if you had the godin with nylon strings (?), it had a very differnt type of pickup than i am using. there are several critical adjustments to set the magnetic pickup correctly that i found eliminated my problems. i use the pitch shifter allot to play slide and actually switched back to my old finger picking style when i play the breadwinner. i find it very responsive to all of the classical techniques i learned in the 60's.
if you get to puerto vallarta some day, i'll set a cold pacifico in front of you and let you play with my breadwinner.
maybe i just got lucky and have a good match of setup and guitar pickup compatibility. i really like mine. it has been good at gigs and my fellow musicians like it too.
manuals suck in general. roland is getting better, and they have video manuals for both units. both the 88 and 33 are highly programmable if like me, you can burn the midnight oil playing around with the possibilities.
if not there is allot of stuff on the internet if you run out of uses for the pre programmed patches.
here are some links. listen and you will see why i got interested. do a google for virtual guitar and guitar synth if you want more.
http://vg-8.com/audio/
http://vg-8.com/
good program at this yahoo group for simplifying programming the 88
http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/VEditor/
this whole end of guitar technology isnt for everyone, actually probably just a few at this point. but then round backed guitars made from modern materials continue to be a topic of debate almost 40 years later. who knows if these two maverick technologies might not have another go at a factory made synth guitar again someday. till then--------------------
by the way my 88 is version 2 which roland will upgrade the original 88 to for free. you have to send it to them, as it is a hardware upgrade. |
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May 2002
Posts: 3005
Location: Las Cruces, NM | Russ
Interesting stuff, I read a review of the line 6 acoustic in last month's "Guitar Player" I think, I gave it to my grandson so I can't cite page nos etc. It was doing the tuning shifts you described, where you could select a different tuning and it would produce that tuning with no change from standard tuning. he reviewer remarked that it wasn't a true acoustic more like an electric hollowbody so you had to be careful that the string's actual sound didn't get picked up by a mike or something and mess up the "tuned" sound.Ever since I have been following the Line 6 guitars, I have imagined the merger and production of a Line 6 Ovation. the Ovation is a natural for this kind of advanced technology.
Bailey |
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Joined:
March 2002
Posts: 873
Location: puerto vallarta, mexico | hi bailey, you are absolutly right. you need to be careful that the standard tuning isn't being picked up and mixed with the pitch shift. also i will have to admit that you need to adjust your playing style to fit the synth/cosm for best results.
first good day in awhile for me on wall street. back to the boards. |
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synth and cosm
