Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Cream / Moving Pictures Digital Guitar Lets You Get More Bloopy With Your Wanky
Posted by Steve Haruch on Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 11:07 AM
Guitar purists, this one's for you: the Misa digital guitar. It's basically the best thing since the keytar! "Guitars by their very nature have limitations," its inventor says. "Electronic music cannot be played effectively with such constraints."
I know what you're saying, shredder: "O RLY?" But give it a chance. After all, Wayne Coyne strapped a Kaoscillator to his guitar and installed a Guitar Hero controller as the second neck. So.
In electronic music, the timbre (or colour) of the sound can be morphed in an infinite number of ways. For a guitar to accommodate this, the right hand needs more control than just plucking strings. You need to be able to control elements of the sound, such as sustain, pitch, filter cutoffs, contour or any other synthesizer parameter, in a way that has no physical constraints.This was my thought process when designing the Misa digital guitar. There are no strings on this instrument. The right hand doesn't pluck strings, it controls sound.
So don't compare Misa digital guitars to acoustic guitars or electric guitars. Those are different instruments, for different artforms, for different music. This is electronic music.
Check the sweet video demo.
I wanna see Brad Paisley play one of these things. Guitarists, knob-tweakers, what say you? Does this mean we'll finally see some power slides at a Hands off Cuba show?
(Via Core77.)
Comments (10)
Showing 1-10 of 10
"Guitars by their very nature have limitations," its inventor says. "Electronic music cannot be played effectively with such constraints."
???
I always thought the inverse was true....hilarious insight from the inventor
(hoc can power slide the hell out of a circuit bent helicopter)
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gotta say. that thing sounds pretty bad ass.
@ohmyben not sure i understand the hilarity. the whole reason such an array of guitar effects pedals exists on the market is to help musicians overcome the limited timbres, colors, pitch, dynamics, etc of the electric guitar. in fact, you'll notice once you start stacking on the guitar effects, it basically just sounds like a keyboard.
if the guitar is so amazingly and unlimitedly versatile, why would you ever need a fuzz or delay pedal?
hell, the whole reason electronic music exists is because composers found the sounds available from acoustic instruments too limiting, especially when they had to be played according to certain scales using fretboards and piano-style keys.
i'd like to hear what you're doing on guitar that makes a genre as widespread as "electronic" sound so limiting.
2 ways to look at that Casio. You are talking about FX, he means the timbre of the instrument itself. I can hit a PD-7 only so many places and set the velocity to only so many variables. But I can hit a physical drum infinity different ways, producing varying tones that are more complex than any machine can replicate. And this is evident when you listen to any instrument. Slight variations in the playing brings out a human element even in classical music. A great example in the percussion world is the tabla. Listen to that thing, there is NO WAY to approximate it.
However, thru the use of triggers, you can explore the other possibilities of FX, multilayers, etc. without losing that human feel. Front of house is a bitch when you set up like that l but it works. The same can be achieved with a guitar synth, Id imagine. So this thing is cool, but not revolutionary.
Kaoscillator is my favorite little toy. Take that thing on planes and make friends!
This is totally badass, but the inventor should not say anything about it replacing or being better than an actual guitar, because it cannot and should not be done, mostly for the reasons listed above (an acoustic instrument reacts in ways electronics cannot simulate--yet.) What this person has made is just a new kind of electronic instrument/controller. It should not and will not replace anything, but having the ability to play any MIDI based synth with an awesome guitar controller has loads of possibilities.
and for the record, most of the guitars that wayne Coyne plays do not server any purpose except props. The Acoustic he "plays" on Yoshimi with the Alesis Air FX built into it does not actually work and he is playing to a sample (he never changes chords when playing it). When I found this out I thought i was kind of lame, but it came from Wayne himself, and they are too badass and way to epic to worry about 4 guys pulling off such a sound with the help of samples.
price tag?
imo, the moog guitar looks way cooler.
this looks like a kaosspad with a neck.
@casio:
yeah confusing statement depending on what you invert, i've always thought limitations were the road to brilliance, a close companion of the happy mistake. i'd buy a misa if i could,i find it hilarious(or sad)that the instrument is marketed not as its own entity (which it seems cool enough to be) but at as a replacement or sub, etc. for the guitar..."electronic" instruments have to be presented as reinventing the wheel to have value, there's often a very real bias against timbre amongst our generation......
Holy shit. Looks like Little Blue Boy just found a new best friend.
http://www.flowerelectronics.com/
fair enough. i guess i took that as a comment on electronic instruments in general. but i still agree with him in that guitars in and of themselves are often difficult to incorporate into electronic music (especially without a shit ton of pedals) due, again, to the limited control you have over them.
this gadget is still pretty limited in and of itself, but coupled with a drum machine and a few other synths and you got a stew going. i can't see you spanning across more than a handful of subgenres with an instrument like this as opposed to the guitar. but i can also see it making a few integral contributions to a couple tracks here in there -- as opposed to using it as one of your main components in every song.
twerdlins, i've always thought the biggest problem with the guitar in "electronic" genres was that it eats up so much of the sonic spectrum,(derek bailey could be an exception, it would've been amazing to hear what he and someone like the rza coulda done in some weird alternate reality). As for the misa if one could blast some bobo mellotron style string or horn samples, one could make a serious wall of awesome
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