Bill Roper's Journal

... I played with one a few years ago and just failed to buy it (which I still regret).

There are some things that guitar synths have problems with, one of which is pitch bend (e.g. tremolo/vibrato and standard solo pitch bends) though you can get some lovely/weird effects by playing such into a piano patch as each note will be quantised to the closest whole semitone)

Another problem is harmonics, particularly as a note decays you may find that at higher order harmonic is grabbed rather than the fundamental.

Also, since most work by picking up the "pitch" from the string vibration, it takes a number of cycles of string vibration to pick up the note, therefore lower notes take longer to track than higher pitched ones. One of the Yamaha guitar synth controllers did indeed use 6 high E strings for that reason (which meant you *really* couldn't take the standard pickup output from that guitar or play it acoustically, you had to remember where the notes were!)

The problem with the standard retro-fit Roland pickups are that positioning can be extremely critical, something you don't have to worry about with the Godin.

Oh, and it can be very confusing feeding a six channel "midi" pickup through some outboard boxes because I remember at least one where you could pitch shift each string separately (so going from standard to DADGAD to drop-D tuning by clicking on footpedal or other midi control) so the "audio out" of the guitar would be in a different tuning to the one coming out of the midi/synth!

Have fun!

p.s. I'll let TWO guitars out of my house to get a good Gibson Les Paul! Let me know if you're willing to sell it to me and we'll figure out how to get it to the UK :-) Of course Tom has first dibs on it I reckon ...