My Favorite Synthesizer Ever Versus an Electric Bass Guitar:

[Edwardo Piet]

I love the Roland TB-303 so much... it's so quirky and juicy.

Enjoy the video!

[The Industrial Atheist]

I wish I had the newer Roland synth used in all the Aggrotech supersaw leads.

[Edwardo Piet]

I dunno what that is... but I do know that FL Studio has a VST instrument called Transistor is extremely faithful to the original TB-303. Look how close they sound:

[Thumpalumpacus]

I don't care for either tones in the OP, but they're somewhat close.

Give me Chuck Rainey thumping on a Fender any day of the week, though.

[Rev. Rye]

Tell me when you can find someone who can match the demos from a Technics KN1000. I'm interested in Wesley Willis and am curious about how to potentially replicate the backing tracks on his songs with my guitar.

[bennyboy]

Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with the comparison, though it's interesting trying to see a bass player imitate a machine.  I have to say, though, that with about 2 effects, that 303 sound could match the live bass almost completely.

I think a lot of live musicians don't realize how close to truth synth instruments can get.  The reason is this: you have to have a good working knowledge of the instrument's mechanics to be able to simulate this.  In the following I used some knowledge of the violin to get pretty damned close to a passable performance, but it took a LOT LOT LOT of time tweaking individual notes.

Here are a couple songs where I felt I got the boxed sounds good enough to pass.  The first is the dual guitar sound (Slayer that comes with Fruity Loops):



And here's one with a violin solo (at 1:06) that my students say I'm lying about because they're sure that can't be computer-generated:


PS sorry about the fullscreen track walls . . . there really should be a scale option for these

[The Industrial Atheist]

Benny. did you use a physical modelling synth for the violin?

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The JP-8000 is the synth I was talking about that is used for all the Supersaw leads. (By artists who have the money for it)

[Thumpalumpacus]

I don't think synths get terribly close to the real instruments in many if not most cases.

Even with drums, where the envelope is much easier to copy, the acoustics of the room interacting with the mics -- and the bleed from one mic to the next -- leave tell-tales. Perhaps digital modeling will one day capture that as well, but it hasn't done so for me yet.

Never mind trying to emulate a drunken guitarist jumping around in the same room as a cranked amp.

[bennyboy]

Benny. did you use a physical modelling synth for the violin?

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The JP-8000 is the synth I was talking about that is used for all the Supersaw leads. (By artists who have the money for it)

No, the synth was sample-based, with about 5 different sets of samples.  A lot of the effects were done by hand. . . carefully adjusting note durations, mixing the different sample types in and out, and most importantly-- learning how a violinist plays-- what chords are possible, impossible, how they play big chords when the bow can at most touch 3 of 4 strings, etc.

The guitar in the first clip, though, was 100% done on a modelling synth called Slayer. You can cover a lot of quirks when you crank up distortion, chorus and reverb!

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I don't think synths get terribly close to the real instruments in many if not most cases.

Even with drums, where the envelope is much easier to copy, the acoustics of the room interacting with the mics -- and the bleed from one mic to the next -- leave tell-tales. Perhaps digital modeling will one day capture that as well, but it hasn't done so for me yet.

Never mind trying to emulate a drunken guitarist jumping around in the same room as a cranked amp.

I think the advancement of high-level electric pianos (like the top Yamaha ones for example) can really show how well they can model features and use them to control sound.  For example, if you use gradations of pedal now, you get different sounds-- the sustain pedal is no longer on/off, and they've modeled how each string responds to different levels (high strings get more easily damped than low ones, just like on a muted guitar).

What I haven't found yet, and I admit the new pianos very likely do it, is synthetic vibration.  On a piano, if I hold a "C" key down so that it makes no sound, and then hit a lower C, the higher C will start ringing.

As for drunken guitarists moving around in the room-- yeah, good luck modeling any of that, nor probably would they even try.  Parts of the human experience are almost guaranteed to be unique, forever.

[Thumpalumpacus]

You're right about piano -- modelers have gotten really good with those algorithms, perhaps because that was a starting point for digital synthesis? At any rate, I've heard even PCM piano patches which sounded fairly good, and once you put it in a mix with other instruments, it can be very hard for me to pick out the fact that it's digital.

I think fretted instrument models suffer due to the fact that the fingers rarely hold the strings identically for each note or each passage, and those very subtle variations aren't really captured by current modeling schemes.