Put down your guitars, gentlemen. The game is up

[James]

This'd be awesome for guys like my mate Jamie. He's a professional composer now, completely self taught and fucking brilliant (bastard! ). He's had some decent sounding guitar VST's for a while, but nothing on that level. I finally got him listening to metal when XXX came out and he saw Rammstein at the start, even though I'd been telling him he'd been writing industiral metal on keyboards for years before that.

[JPhoenix19]

What if you could use one of the newer rock band or guitar hero controllers that has a button for each fret? hmmm....

[Variant]

HAVE YOU GUYS NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO ANYTHING MY CURRENT PROJECT'S BEEN DOING?

Probably not... I've dropped it in convo a few times, but it's on the DL mostly. Anywho, we've been pushing this angle for a while now. At the moment we're still scheming on guitar-to-MIDI solutions as few have put much thought into the concept of a guitar sending MIDI to control... um... guitar sounds. So, we're really working our way backwards from the software/computer end of things first. There is a lot in the works.

Right now I'm just* running Vir2's Electri6ity + an in-process multisample table of my very own to supplement notes from A1 and down (way, way, way down) as most don't take the "Meshuggah range" into consideration, let alone "The Surfacing range". I also plan to add at least Prominy's LPC and Impact Soundworks' Shreddage into the stack for more layers. Moar = moar. Devy says so.

* My CPU is run to the hilt!

Basically, through some nifty trickery I came up with by taking redundant modules of each library in Kontakt and feeding them a MIDI note offset one halfstep up & one halfstep down, then re-pitching the modules' respective DI outputs back to center, you can make a wall of six (as these modules have enough multis to double track, R/L) guitars from each library. Think about that. Three instances of Electri6ity plus three instances of LPC can belt out 12 tracks of guitar, all being fed from ONE MIDI channel. Each instance is bussed to individual channels and are run though whatever I want: Reamp to real fucking amps in a studio one track at a time, or (as we're doing now) though individual instances of LePou's LeCto and Nick Crow's 8505, then passed into dual cabs (each!) of the best IR's at the moment.

Basically, I hit one power chord and a wall of 12 guitars through 12 amps, through 24 cab IRs erupt at simultaneously. Of course, this takes a megaton of processing power, so custom server-style computers are in the works.

Is it? Is someone playing a piano piece via MIDI keyboard controller triggering a piano library in Kontakt or the like "redundant"?

Haters be damned, that was awesome.

Thank you, Chris!

There's a lot of unexplored potential here. Granted, a lot of this stuff has been designed with keyboardists and composers in mind so there are limitations and I know we can't build music 100% off it, but really the idea of "sound replacement" in the guitar department isn't all that alien if you think about how it's become the norm other places, especially the drums. Frankly, a lot of these demos sound stiff as shit because they're played by keyboardists and/or arranged on a MIDI roll. We're playing actual guitar into Cubase/FL Studio and using VariAudio/newTone to take the more natural "flow" of guitar playing to MIDI.

I mean, really, HOW many bands these days slip edit the utter shit out of their stuff? Cut up their fucking DI tracks and move the blocks around independently... set crossfades, then reamp the result to get an album. The only difference here is it's way less of a pain in the cronk to dick with the MIDI... and, again, the potential for doubling, quad tracking, etc. is as simple as dropping in another module of samples. Also: There is the potential for harmonization with out the unnatural sounding artifacting associated with pitch processing.

How did they do the squeals?

It's built into the articulations and keyswitches. The guitar range does not cover the entire 88-key range so some of the very low and very high notes can articulate all sorts of things, be it one shots, articulating palm mutes, chuckas, harmonics, etc. Electri6ity, for instance, is INSANELY deep... to the point that there are two keyswitches for each unused key depending if they're played soft or hard, plus combo switches on top of that. It's all customizable, and things like pick angle, palm rub noise, pickup hum, are all adjustable in the menus. Prominy even sampled the noise of the pickup switch so it emanates when you go from bridge to neck.

The cool thing is, if you're industrious and sampler literate, you can easily add your own multis. Like, for instance, I use the Gojira sweepy-harmonic-scrape thing alot... so, I multisampled it and added it to my library... now whenever I want it, like a bell shot in Superior, I just call it up.

[James]

Sounds very cool Ryan Just one question, what's an IR?

* James is a n00b at computer based recording