Guitars & Music Tech

The different tuning puts me off, I have to admit but I might give it a go one day.

Bass does seem cool. I make do with an octave pedal for now. I nearly snapped and bought a used bass last year but ukes will start overtaking the house if I get any more!

Yes it would need to be a particularly bad day for them not to bring on a smile.

it's so easy to get out of these things.

Yes! Used to love playing around with Guitar Pro 7, REAPER and BIAS FX. Made a few little instrumental albums many years ago. Nothing special, but it brings joy to create something. Or just to noodle along on a loop pedal. Must get myself back into it again!

I used to dabble in instruments, had an acoustic guitar, digital keyboard, an Incan ocarina and a harmonica. I still own the ocarina and harmonica

Nah I’m pretty awful at cavaquinho because it is a completely different tuning (D-G-B-D), but it is a nice sound!

Sibelius used to be (maybe still is) the flagship type notation software as I remember it. I loved Logic but moved to Cubase when it became Mac only. 

I love uke's. I have a concert also with the wound G preference.

I want a bass uke - they're so cool.

One great thing about ukuleles in general is simply holding and playing one cheers me up. 

Nice. I have two tenors (Low G with wound G & C strings and a reentrant D), a super tenor with high G and a soprano. Would you say the cavaquinho has any advantage? 

I used to teach basic music technology at a university, but my focus was primarily on notation software: Namely Sibelius and Finale. Nowadays I only have Notion, now that Finale is defunct. I’m also really good at Logic and I’ve made some interesting avant-garde pieces with Audacity.

I have three ukuleles (tenor, concert, and soprano) and a cavaquinho!

Whilst I like the sound of guitars (particularly resonators) my obsession is more their cousin the ukulele. Mostly I play acoustically, occasionally I hook them up to guitar pedals and amps if the mood takes me. 

I like repairing and building to but my time for these activities has been limited recently.

I worked for about twelve years for a sound company. We developed 3D audio for sound cards and indirectly for games. The company has long since gone but I'm still interested in synthesisers and music.

I never learned to play any instrument but I do play around with DAWs and try to produce some short pieces of music, other than that I'm stuck. I can't seem to get past 8 bars!

I play Guitar, Drums, Bass, Piano, Ukulele, Mandolin, Harmonica, Banjo, Bongos, and Melodica. 

Yeah, I'm always writing stuff and composing stuff when I can and whenever I get an idea.

Oh wow. That's so great. I totally share the feeling of being myself with a guitar. Second only to cats, guitar is my favourite thing and greatest sense of 'one-ness'. 

Hard industry for anyone but the extra challenges must be massive. 

Yeah, music and guitars have been my obsession since I was 12 (I'm in my 40's now). When I was younger, I took a music technology course and worked in a small studio for a bit, but failed to turn that experience into a viable job, due to the usual challenges an autistic person faces (plus, I had no idea I was autistic back then, which didn't help). 

The only wise choice I made in my life was to never stop playing the guitar. Music helps me decompress, and it's really the only thing that allows me to feel like my true self. 

I haven't been able to make my own guitars as of yet, but it's definitely in the bucket list. For now, I set them up and customise them. And I build / modify pedals, which is whole other addiction in itself... 

Ah, OK. Granular synthesis is based on the idea that any sound can be created by stacking sounds of very short length on top of each other / together. The sounds in lengths of milliseconds are the "grains" part of granular synthesis. In real terms, they're often very short samples of sound. I suppose it's like building up a sound's profile by putting individual peaks together to build a soundwave. Sort-of the opposite of subtractive synthesis maybe? Instead of starting with a sound and then manipulating it with filters and so on, you're building the sound from the ground up. I don't really know how this works practically. The Wikipedia page on granular synthesis explains it better than I do...! 

en.wikipedia.org/.../Granular_synthesis

As far as not having use for this at the moment, it's a question of prioritising what limited time & energy I have on music projects I'm currently working on or trying to finish and balancing other time and health commitments! I'm sure I will learn more about it, just not yet!

Oh yes. It's mind blowing to me... Subtractive synthesis as theoretically able to create any sound given enough complexity. And sample based synthesis basically just being replacement of the waveform component. 

I know nothing about granular synthesis of note. Interested? Totally!

These days most synths I have are all software based, but I do have the Korg Multi/Poly. It's basically wavetable source (as well as the traditional wave shapes) going into a conceptually vanilla subtractive type control layout. But it's got some really interesting modulation options, including sequencing those, and ... It's fun. 

Your last paragraph: I can't help think you'll understand it if you decide to learn about granular... But I'm unable to personally relate to "not...have a use" being a deterrent

Oh yes, definitely! I got into synths completely by accident after buying a Boss synth pedal for guitars / bass. I loved the sound and what it was doing and thought "I want to know how that works and how to make those sounds". I have a very good book called "Creating Sounds From Scratch" which goes into great depth but is surprisingly easy to read and follow. I think it might be a course book for a module at Berklee College of Music in the USA.

The thing that really upended me was learning that a lost of sound synthesis comes from subtractive processes! You create the sound you want by choosing a VCO which gives you the sort of transients, fundamentals and overtones that you want and then shape those with the filters, envelopes and effects, and use the LFO to modulate those. It's amazing!

I want to learn more about granular synthesis, but I suspect it's very complicated and I'm not sure I have a use for it at the moment, I'm having so much fun playing with subtractive synthesis! 

I LOVE Synths. 

The magazine publication Sound On Sound ran a very long (63 magazine articles in sequential monthly editions) series on synthesis from May 1999. Basically everything from the absolute fundamentals through to much more advanced things. I won't pretend I've read it, and a bit of it I know, but about 90% of which I don't. It was called 'Synth Secrets' and by their writer/magazine contributor Gordon Reid.

But synths themselves fascinate me. The idea of electronically replicating any (in theory) sound possible. I've always found the basic building blocks of analogue type synthesis (VCO's, LFO's, Envelopes, Filters, Envelopes) the most interesting. Not purely due to their basics, but as stuff you can apply 'to' recorded sound - whether samples or audio tracks to create effects.