Comments on: Vo-96 Acoustic Synthesizer

Vo-96 Acoustic Synthesizer

kliuless — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:08:23 -0800

How Inventor Paul Vo Created a Little Black Box That Could Change Guitars Forever

By: middleclasstool

middleclasstool — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:20:25 -0800

That makes me want to learn guitar just so I can play with one of those.

By: cccorlew

cccorlew — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:36:50 -0800

I didn't get at first that it's totally acoustic. The magic gizmo makes the strings vibrate differently. I'd love to hear one in person.

By: neustile

neustile — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:39:03 -0800

Reminds me a lot of the magnetic resonator piano.

By: swift

swift — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:41:10 -0800

This is really cool, but I wonder what the advantage is of "pre-processing" the wave directly on the string vs. processing the pickup output like usual? I would love to hear the range of sounds this thing can make.

By: cthuljew

cthuljew — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:43:58 -0800

swift: I think the idea is that you get the timbre of an acoustic.

By: Now there are two. There are two _______.

Now there are two. There are two _______. — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:47:20 -0800

This is a cool gadget, but a very frustrating writeup. Too much "zomg this is mindblowingly impossible and violates the laws of physics!!!1!," too little "here's what's going on." My sense is that they're describing something like an EBow, but adapted to work better on acoustic guitar strings and with a lot more ability to process the signal before it's fed back into the string driver. But that's just a guess.

By: odinsdream

odinsdream — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:47:20 -0800

That is so badass.

By: iamabot

iamabot — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:47:23 -0800

Now I have to go sell my first born to get one with the handmade guitar on the kickstarter campaign.

By: Now there are two. There are two _______.

Now there are two. There are two _______. — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:59:14 -0800

swift: I think the idea is that you get the timbre of an acoustic. Right, but you can do that already — by putting a normal microphone in front of an acoustic guitar, and then run the microphone signal through some effect pedals. Looking at the videos, I think I can see one advantage of this thing over the old-fashioned microphone/effects/amp/speaker way of doing it. On this thing, "reverb" seems to mean "push some of the signal back into the strings so that they'll keep vibrating longer." Which seems to mean that you can cut the reverb off at exactly the point you want it to cut off, just by muting the strings. You can get a similar effect with a reverb pedal — by stomping on it at just the right moment — but I'm willing to bet that for a good guitarist, this would be a much more natural-feeling way to control it.

By: tspae

tspae — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:03:33 -0800

Basically it's an acoustic guitar additive synth. It manipulates the first 16 overtones, sorta like Hammond drawbars only on strings. That's interesting, but it would need envelope processing to get very far beyond pipe-organ-in-a-guitar.

By: RobotVoodooPower

RobotVoodooPower — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:05:02 -0800

I get the impression that this is the sort of thing that sounds a *lot* cooler in person than recorded.

By: Ardiril

Ardiril — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:08:21 -0800

This is without doubt a new instrument altogether. What will characterize this is the extent of its limitations and how future versions deal with those. I am impressed that the initial price range is $1050 to $1450.

By: umbú

umbú — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:25:20 -0800

Until people get used to this, there are going to be passersby utterly baffled by magical buskers.

By: Ardiril

Ardiril — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:27:23 -0800

Imagine what this could do to a sitar.

By: infinitewindow

infinitewindow — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:28:40 -0800

Ooooh additive synthesis.

By: scose

scose — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:32:39 -0800

It can add energy to make a string ring out, but can it mute/dampen a string? It's not clear from the video or article.

By: Monday, stony Monday

Monday, stony Monday — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:33:07 -0800

Now there are two. There are two _______: There is a difference: mathematically the traditional way goes Sound = Effect(Timbre(Vibration)). This way goes Timbre(Effect(Vibration)). If (Timbre . Effect) is not the same as (Effect . Timbre), you get different results.

By: charlie don't surf

charlie don't surf — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:48:09 -0800

I don't see the point. A good modern solid body guitar like my Les Paul has infinite sustain, for all practical purposes, unless you're a maniac who likes writing songs with more than 30 seconds of a single sustained note. If you really need infinite sustain, there have been machines like the Gizmotron that will continuously "bow" your strings using rollers. If you need analog effects mounted on your guitar, they've been around since the Les Paulverizer.

By: zsazsa

zsazsa — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:56:13 -0800

The point is that you don't need an amp, effects pedals, or cables. Just clip on your acoustic guitar and go.

By: Now there are two. There are two _______.

Now there are two. There are two _______. — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:59:40 -0800

It can add energy to make a string ring out, but can it mute/dampen a string? It's not clear from the video or article. Oh, sorry, I wasn't saying this effects box can dampen the strings all by itself. I was saying it looks like the guitarist can — like, say, by palm-muting it — and that will interrupt the reverb effect.

By: Ardiril

Ardiril — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:59:47 -0800

Also, when you turn the unit off, you pretty much have a standard acoustic guitar.

By: silence

silence — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:05:19 -0800

A friend has a couple of the electric Moogs - they're really not like normal guitars with some effects built in. They can sustain forever, so you can play them in very un-guitar-like ways and as @scose mentioned above they can also remove energy from the string to dampen it so the note dies immediately, or in interesting banjo-y ways. Why? The people saying you could just post-process the audio are missing the point. A musical instrument isn't really a machine for making sounds - it's a machine for *controlling* sounds. You could sample a violin and play it on a keyboard and it would make *exactly* the same sound as a violin, but a keyboard doesn't afford you anything like the control or expressiveness of directly touching the strings of a violin (though, of course, it has other advantages). The main characteristics of an instrument come not from the particular sound it can produce but the ways that you can interact with that sound to expressively shape it. And that's why the fact that this device produces the sounds acoustically is important - because the musician can control the timbre with his/her fingers by touching the string to damp or emphasise harmonics, change string tension etc. in very subtle and intuitive ways which just aren't possible by post processing which would simply layer an effect over the whole thing. This isn't a device to just produce a different sound, it's a device that allows you to play in a different way.

By: w0mbat

w0mbat — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:08:14 -0800

You guys need to watch the second video further down the page, because it shows the technology much better. Vo's technology can manipulate the strings in any way it wants through individual EM fields. It can stop the strings dead, it can sustain them forever, and it applies this power intelligently based on what strings you are using (i.e. it doesn't vibrate strings you aren't using and can mute unused strings actively). That tech was in the Moog guitar that came out a few years ago. The new thing with this box is that it can also boost or cut different harmonics in the string vibration pattern. That leads (in the second video) to some really interesting natural sounds that have a lot of musical possibilities. There's one bit that sounds like guitar & organ, another with a haunting bell sound overlaid.

By: jimmythefish

jimmythefish — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:09:33 -0800

I don't see the point. While I personally don't like making whale music and I have nothing more than a passive K&K Western Mini in my D28, it's pretty unique and I can see a use for it by people that are wanting to Josh-Groban-featuring-Yanni the fuck out of something and stand on a cliff edge overlooking a windswept coastline at sunset in Namibia and sing about astral plains and sailing to Io. To each his own.

By: schmod

schmod — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:10:53 -0800

One gripe I have is that the waves it seems to be sending back into the guitar are far too "clean." They sound like a pipe organ, rather than a guitar. Still, this is some pretty nifty work.

By: lazaruslong

lazaruslong — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:15:05 -0800

So incredible that I'm gonna forgive the fact that they misspelled Asheville, home of Moog, in the article.

By: Foosnark

Foosnark — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:24:08 -0800

It can add energy to make a string ring out, but can it mute/dampen a string? It's not clear from the video or article. Sure it can; the Moog Guitar already does. All you do is swap the phase of the wave. I don't see the point. This isn't just about infinite sustain. You can do things like play just the third harmonic on a timed delay after you've picked it. There are a lot of sound design options here. It's additive synthesis but in the acoustic realm. It could, theoretically, play an entire song without you. Or harmonize, or act as a loop pedal without the pedal. Even the better demo video doesn't even begin to touch on what this technology can potentially do.

By: pyramid termite

pyramid termite — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:24:53 -0800

I wonder what the advantage is of "pre-processing" the wave directly on the string vs. processing the pickup output like usual? the advantage is the string's timbre itself is changed, which gives you a different sound to process when it gets out of the pickup the second advantage, and it's a huge one, is that one doesn't have to worry about latency or tracking --- You could sample a violin and play it on a keyboard and it would make *exactly* the same sound as a violin, but a keyboard doesn't afford you anything like the control or expressiveness of directly touching the strings of a violin which is why a guitar synth would be a better controller for that kind of thing - or for things like sax samples to me though, the drawback is the design decision to only have a few presets instead of full control over the 16 overtones on each string - yes, it complicates the user interface a lot, but usb to a computer would help with that, and one can always have a few user presets available for the sounds that people design something that's well over 1000 bucks needs to have that kind of functionality to be worth it, at least to me

By: frenetic

frenetic — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:33:38 -0800

I've watched a bunch of videos and the sound gets pretty samey and boring to me after the initial "oh, neat" reaction wears off. It'll be interesting to see if songwriters do anything cool with it.

By: scose

scose — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:38:46 -0800

You can never hope for anything interesting from a music tech demo. Even the most amazing synthesizers and software get demo'd with the same lightweight fake jazzy dance-like music or progressive rock noodling.

By: kenko

kenko — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:42:22 -0800

but it would need envelope processing to get very far beyond pipe-organ-in-a-guitar. Maybe that's true (I don't know what envelope processing is) but a pipe organ with lots of stops can produce a bewildering variety of sounds and timbres, so, no big loss?

By: 2N2222

2N2222 — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:59:37 -0800

Yes, it's sort of like a smart Ebow or Sustainer. I think this is one of those things that looks far more impressive than it usually turns out to be in real life. See: Ebow and Sustainer. Rather than synthesis or any other comparison, I predict it will probably be used to give acoustic guitar a very recognizable "Vo-95" tonal quality. As the demos show, it can exhibit a very drone-y, organ-y timbre quite easily. And can do percussive, pluck-y, banjo-y tones. Modulating the harmonics can give a pleasant swirly effect. I'm curious to see how far this kind of electromagnetic/electromechanical manipulation can go. From the demos, it doesn't really sound like additive synthesis to me, but rather harmonic emphasis. It would seem possible with such a smart device to go beyond, and manipulate harmonic content enough to make, for example, a sort of acoustic fuzzbox tonality, or even give sub harmonics, and beyond. There is no doubt that this is a very impressive technological achievement, though.

By: Ardiril

Ardiril — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:12:25 -0800

"I've watched a bunch of videos and the sound gets pretty samey and boring" Engineers are rarely advanced musicians. They have to get the product into the hands of the artists to play and experiment for awhile before any real judgment of its musical worth.

By: sgt.serenity

sgt.serenity — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 13:41:15 -0800

I thought this would be a bit better tbh

By: readyfreddy

readyfreddy — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:29:27 -0800

As someone who grew up with a distinct synthesizer fetish (and a fair bit of guitar revulsion), one thing I learned quite quite early about guitarists is this: they're happy to leave their technology set at 1968. Wood and magnets, get offa my lawn. There's no talking to them.

By: Now there are two. There are two _______.

Now there are two. There are two _______. — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:42:09 -0800

Heh. Yeah, I imagine the target market is "People who were seriously thinking for a while in there about buying a Stick."

By: bongo_x

bongo_x — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 16:07:54 -0800

"zomg this is mindblowingly impossible and violates the laws of physics!!!1!," Yes. Can't anything just be a tool anymore? First there is the ridiculous hype, then the skepticism over the hype, the backlash from the "you just don't get it, the world just fundamentally changed and can never go back" crowd, and then in 6 months it will just be another tool that some people use and everyone else ignores. See; Segway, Melodyne DNA, etc.

By: RobotVoodooPower

RobotVoodooPower — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:25:19 -0800

Andy Summers Demos The Roland GR300 Guitar Synth

By: lumpenprole

lumpenprole — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:18:16 -0800

It's pretty cool and all, but it does seem like a lot of work to make sounds we have around already.

By: misterbee

misterbee — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:49:35 -0800

Given that I love to tool around with FX, but for various reasons (mostly to do with being a dad with a lot less space than I'd like, and time to set up gear, and limits on how loudly I can play, especially at night) I limit my playing to acoustic guitar, and that I love organ sounds, and harmonics, and open tunings - this could be for me. I own an Ebow, but find it a bit of a pain to use. Also, the comments on the linked page are almost all variations on "meh". Guitar-shop arseholes. The MeFi comments, as usual, are a lot more even-handed and open-minded. Yay!

By: charlie don't surf

charlie don't surf — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:20:18 -0800

Andy Summers Demos The Roland GR300 Guitar Synth I loved that clip because just as I was getting fed up with the ridiculous early 80's synth bullshit, they cut away to a jam session where he's playing a 1955 Les Paul Junior.