[LAD] [PD-announce] smeck (6ch guitar processing patch) released]

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi Frank :)

Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Hallo,
> Ralf Mardorf hat gesagt: // Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>
>   
>> Frank Barknecht wrote:
>>     
>>> "Smeck" is not for midi, but for audio pickups. You need a separate pickup for
>>> each string.
>>>   
>>>       
>> The Roland GK is designed for MIDI usage. I don't know the actual hex 
>> pickups. If it's not directly to MIDI, does it mean for Smeck a sound 
>> card with 6 IOs is needed and the sound of the strings is used as 
>> wave-source instead of the information about the note, to control 
>> oscillators as wave-source? 
>>     
>
> Yes, that's it - at least on a very, very basic level. Miller's patch for
> guitar is one very advanced beast showing some very cool and cutting edge
> synthesis methods. It's not your run-of-the-mill guitar effects processor. In
> fact it make me want to be able to play guitar. :)
>   

I'm a guitarist, but if I like to play guitar by using my ability, I 
prefer to play the guitar as a classical electric guitar. Even for 
experimental music it is not bad to be able to play guitar, as we can 
hear by listening to Fred Frith and other experimental musicians, but to 
do it there's no need to be able to play guitar.

Have you ever thought about playing the guitar similar to the way a 
Trautonium is played?

Music shouldn't be acrobatic feat, some people know how to play scales 
and chords, but they are to dull to make music, listen to rubbish like 
Dream Theatre.

If you're creative, you can use a guitar even if you aren't a guitarist. 
The advantage of strings is, that you have more impact to the sound by 
your fingers, as if using a keyboard. You don't need to be a guitarist 
to have impact to the sound for experimental music. For 'normal' music I 
can't see any reason to have effects. I only need two effects, an 
overdrive and a compression sustainer to increase the sustain, when 
playing with the bottleneck, but without overdrive. Sometimes in 
addition some other effects are beautiful.

I like guitar synth for experimental music only.

Btw. if you will practise tow years, you are able to play as fast and 
clean as the Dream Theatre guy, even if you don't have any talent. I 
guess you can learn how to play guitar in half a year, with or without 
talent, if you have talent, than you only will be able to play a little 
bit better. I guess guitar is one of the easiest to learn instruments, 
only the beginning give the impression that playing keyboard might be 
easier to do, because playing chords the first weeks seems to be 
impossible, while you don't have such problems when playing chords on a 
keyboard, but this is a wrong impression.

>> Might be a good idea to avoid latency 
>> because of the pitch detection, but not a big difference to effect 
>> processors for normal pickups. 
>>     
>
> It does pitch detection inside of Pd to tune the transformations to the pitch
> played, so you still get a bit of latency (pitch detection is made on blocks of
> 1024 samples afaik.)
>
>   
>> Hm, I didn't read the link ;)
>>     
>
> Maybe you'd want to? Here's the deep link: 
> http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/smeck/latest/doc/
> and the pd~convention paper: 
> http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/Publications/pd07-reprint.pdf
> rsp. http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/Publications/pd07-reprint.dir/
>
> Ciao
>   

Thank you, I'm interested in reading about it, but I won't buy a hex 
pickup for my guitars. I'm not a keyboarder, but good enough to use 
keyboards for my needs, that's why I guess it isn't worth the effort to 
buy a hex pickup etc.. Anyway it's good that some people develop such 
equipment and software.

Cheers,
Ralf