Post
by MrYellow » Thu Nov 17, 2005 7:27 am
Quite impressed.
Yamaha G50 + Yamaha G1D guitar pickup on a Yamaha Pacifica strat copy.
Lots of options for putting the pickup on, however there wasn't enough
space for the doublesided tape and didn't have a drill on hand.
So.... Used one of the 2nd smallest spacers, about 1/4mm and a glue gun.
Plugged in to a crappy old Yamaha YPR-9.... It's like a home practice midi
keyboard from the days before they had flashy lights and all the stupid
crap they put on them now. No pitch bend, real simple.
This really blew me away, without pitch bend getting in the way and on such
a simple system it tracked awesome, I was really impressed, far better
then I expected.
Started up Live and put in a Simpler..... Mostly the same result, expect
pitch bend messes some types of sounds, like those that really sound
good perfectly straight. You can program a patch to have no pitch bend
data being sent so that's not a problem.
Started up Forte with some NI instruments. This I didn't like so much,
Simplier gave it a nice solid base to work on, having such complex synths
with more latency really means u need to tweak the patch settings for the
individual synth. Depending on the sound you might want the note-off
volume to be lower for example. You'd really want to get together a library
of patches for which you've tweaked the G50 to react in a way that suits the
playing style you'd use with that synth sound.
So went back to Simplier and played around some more..... It's more
forgiving of not having the settings individually set for each sound, you
could get away with just a couple of patches on the G50, i.e. one with no
pitch bend being sent.
Started getting more familiar with the tracking and it started to be a little
annoying here and there. BUT.... I had shifted gears, I had started trying
to get clean perfect lines from it.... When I picked it up, it was rock, fusion,
raw, no trying to be perfect..... This I believe is the way to treat this gear,
throw it around, make it break the sound and have odd bits come out at
the wrong time..... It's what makes it alive. If I wanted perfect everything
I'd just use the keyboard.
Next I setup the audio out into my RME and setup an audio channel with
Amplitude, made up a nice metal guitar sound, and picked at a few
Simplier patches I found sounded good earlier. Now this was awesome, you
have the guitar going, with added attack from the synth/sampler sounds,
really added beef and really made it interesting. Quite cool mixing the
different sounds, while the guitar under everything gives you an organic
foundation so any quirks from the MIDI just add flavour.
On the tracking, I found a hammer-on from 5th to 7th will often get blurred
into a chromatic 5th, 6th, 7th run, it does it fairly gracefully tho, it's not a
harsh chromatic, a bit of bend in there (think it sorta glissandos it). Sounds
good with the guitar under as you can have a basey sound doing
something ever so slightly different to the analog. You can actually get a
fair bit of control over the miss-tracking or different interpretation from the
G50, so you can consciously control the MIDI sound separate to the analog
sound.
All this sounds like the tracking is crap and I'm just looking for ways to
ignore it, but I really think it does a good job. It has no trouble tracking
scale work, not sure of my BPM but I can run up and down scales, doing
them in intervals steps, interval runs etc and it keeps up fine. I'm not as
fast as on bass but I imagine it's a decent pace, hard to tell cause I know
some real lightning players. might have to give them a go to see how it
keeps up with them.
It also tracks raw playing pretty well, open E string getting slammed and
vibrating like crazy sometimes gets read as a semitone down, but I can't
understand why, a string going so nuts it's hitting frets does that anyway.
What's cool tho is you can be really hitting a couple of strings at once
without a care in the world for what the trouble the G50 might be having
and yet it still tracks it, all in all, very well.
If you want clean perfectness, you'll have to play clean. Nice fretting, clean
pick work, no miss-touching of non-playing strings, watch the finger mutes
(it does seem to track better with a palm mute tho).
But why the hell would u want to play clean perfectness????
This brings raw energy into crazy electronic shit that is so often step
sequenced and perfect, anything that breaks stuff is awesome in my book.
So all in all, if I was trying to play clean tone jazz guitar with a piano sound
perfectly and I had paid $1000 for this I'd be disappointed. However seeing
that I want to make bad phat deep ugly sounds and only paid AU$300 I'm
really impressed.
Along with my MIDI sax and other toys I really doubt I'll ever get told I'm
just checking email or playing cards.
-Ben