I’m sure we’ve all glared at our keyboardist friends with envy at the sheer volume of sounds they’re able to call up at will while we’re happily stuck within the confines of what a guitar, effect and amp setup can naturally do. And not to get all ‘infomercial‘ about it, but synth/MIDI guitar can be pretty expensive to implement. You need a guitar with a suitable pickup for capturing the basic information from each individual string, and this can take the form of a special hex pickup or piezo elements linked into an electronic brain. You need an interface to turn that information into MIDI data. And then you need a MIDI sound module to turn that data into music again.
It’s enough to make you throw your hands up in the air and shout “There’s got to be an easier way!”
Well, there is. Sort of.
This is a method I’ve had a lot of success with, but unfortunately it only works in a studio or home recording situation: the Audio to MIDI feature of auto tuning software such as Melodyne. I know, right? Who would have thought that autotune could actually come to the aid of guitarists? But it’s really quite simple: the same part of the software that identifies the notes and rhythms of an audio signal is able to convert those notes and rhythms into MIDI data which you can then play back via synth plugins. You don’t even have to mess with the pitch of your original guitar notes, so you can maintain all the nuances of your guitar performance.
Depending on the clarity of your guitar signal you may need to tidy up the MIDI a little bit, but you might even luck out like me and find that sometimes an imperfectly rendered MIDI track actually blends with the original guitar performance in a really cool way. And it’s incredibly easy to simply grab a MIDI note and shift it higher or lower to create a harmony, or to layer other notes with it to create chords where there weren’t chords before. Best of all, this kind of software is becoming pretty inexpensive and is often bundled with digital audio workstation (DAW) software.
So how can you use this in a musical context? Let’s look at a few ways:
Replacing a guitar part with a synth part
This is great for those of us home studio boffins who kinda wish we were a one-person Dream Theater, but who suck at keyboard (like me). Record a guitar solo, dump it into your autotune program, render the MIDI, send that to a software instrument, delete the original guitar track and boom: instant keyboard solo. Or rather, a keyboard solo in about ten minutes, once you factor in all the futzing around. And it doesn’t just have to be a solo: you can play atmospheric single-note drones or simple melodies then drop them into your track in place of a synth part. Or thicken up a power chord riff by playing it as single notes an octave higher then putting it through a synth pad preset.
Doubling a guitar part with a synth part
There’s something incredibly cool about doubling your guitar lines with a synth part. It can add a sense of drama and majesty to an improvised solo, or put an orchestrational spin on an otherwise simple composed part. Clean jazz guitar tones go great with a piano patch, while distorted shred melodies tend to sound killer when doubled by a brass or voice patch. And try using a fat, envelope-filtered analog synth sound alongside a downtuned power chord riff. It can sound utterly huge.
Layering cool Zappa-sounding percussion
You don’t just have to use the MIDI track to play back a purely melodic instrument: try using a sound from the percussion family such as marimba or even a drum kit patch and you’ll open up a whole new world of orchestrational weirdness. This is especially great for unstructured, free-time jazz odysseys.
Here’s a collection of examples: four little musical snippets, each one followed by its synthefied cousin. It’s recorded with a Buddy Blaze Sevenator seven-string prototype with a poplar body, maple neck and ebony fretboard, and Seymour Duncan Full Shred and ’59 humbuckers.
Lick 1 is a simple bluesy lead line, replaced by a Fender Rhoades synth patch. You’ll hear that the autotune didn’t quite catch all of the information, so there are some differences between the guitar lick and the MIDI version. I could have fudged the MIDI info to make it match, but I kinda like it this way: it’s like the virtual keyboard player has improvised his own part.
Lick 2 is a moody eighth-note riff replaced by a big fat synth part. It has a sort of goth-rock feel.
Lick 3 is an atonal, jazzy little lick doubled by a music box synth patch. It has some of that whacked-out Zappa vibe.
Lick 4 is a chunky riff doubled by a panning synth patch. Great for post-rock or shred rhythm extravaganzas!
Of course, using a guitar synth will always be the preferred way of doing this stuff live, but if your band uses backing tracks for the occasional sample or backing vocals you could quite easily create a track of a synth part or two to use within your live show as well.
