Will o' the Wisp

I had an action item from a parking lot discussion today...a couple of friends had different mental definitions of "Will o' the Wisp" than I had.  One said "isn't that a book?" and the other "Isn't that a plant like a cattail?" whereas I had said it was a mysterious glowing light usually in a bog or a swamp.
Well, according to Britannica.com: "... a mysterious light seen at night flickering over marshes; when approached, it advances, always out of reach. The phenomenon is also known as will-o’-the-wisp andignis fatuus (Latin: “foolish fire”). In popular legend it is considered ominous and is often purported to be the soul of one who has been rejected by hell carrying its own hell coal on its wanderings. The phenomenon is generally believed to be due to the spontaneous ignition of marsh gas, which consists mostly of methane and which is produced by the decomposition of dead plant matter."


But wait!  Before I let it all go to my head in prideful righteousness, I did a search on Amazon.com and there are 183 entries in Books with the title Will o' the Wisp, the most famous being a publication from 1947 novel by the Baroness Orczy.


I also said that I thought it was a title of a jazz song - but upon further reflection I realized I was thinking of "Willow Weep for Me", famously played by Art Tatum, as demonstrated here. (Sotto voce: this is a really mindblowing performance - Art Tatum was a true genius on the piano.)

Sadly, I must report that a Will o' the wisp is not a cattail.  Sorry KP!

Rediscovering Guitar Synthesizers: The GR-55 Journey, Part 3

The GR-55 as a MIDI controller

I am in the midst of composing a song that has a small orchestral arrangement and thought that this might be a good excuse to try out the GR-55 as a MIDI controller.  For this undertaking I would just be needing to step-wise record a few parts into Notion.  I found the set up to be very intuitive and quite an improvement over the GR-30 which was highly dependent on the patch you selected.

Since I wasn't recording real-time, I didn't get to assess too closely the performance with regard to glitches.  However, with only a couple of unintentional note triggers I was able to quickly enter several music sections that were mostly 8th notes.  It was much quicker than entering the notation via the mouse and keyboard.

I didn't use the USB interface for MIDI but used a standard MIDI cable out of the GR-55 into my Focusrite MIDI interface.

Once I get a little further along in the song, and perhaps try out the real-time MIDI recording I'll see about posting the song.

Hello, Trello!

While investigating something completely unrelated, I came across a new web application by Fog Creek Software called Trello. It's basically a free, easy-to-use collaboration tool that organizes your project (or anything else, really) into boards, lists and cards.  I've decided to try it out with my Roland GR-55 project.  You can take a look here: https://trello.com/board/gr-55-exploration/4f8788b50e878ff14102f99f

Rediscovering Guitar Synthesizers: The GR-55 Journey, Part 2

I completed one of my self-appointed tasks.  Here's my first try at testing out the looper feature to build a song right before your ears.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdzCO7N_7as

Rediscovering Guitar Synthesizers: The GR-55 Journey, Part 1

Yesterday I purchased the Roland GR-55 guitar synthesizer, after fretting (pun intended) about it for awhile.  I've decided to keep a blog to document my experience of coming up to speed on the unit and hopefully getting the most out of it.  As of this moment, I'm a bit conflicted; I may end up loving the thing, or I may find myself returning it before my 30-day return window closes.


I am not new to guitar synthesis - I own a GR-30, which is a previous generation guitar synthesizer released last century - 1997 to be specific.  I gigged with the GR-30 and did some home studio recording, but eventually the unit was relegated to very sporadic use as I would occasionally use it as a midi controller for recording sequenced tracks.  I abandoned using its on-board sounds all together.


I play a Godin LGX-SA (perhaps I'll post a picture soon) which has been a great guitar, and one of its "voices" is the 13-pin guitar synthesizer output.  The fact that I regularly play this guitar synth-ready guitar factored highly into my decision to try the new GR-55.

First Impressions

After reading the manual and going through the divided pick-up set up process, my very first impression was "Hmm, this might not even be tracking as well as the 15-year-old GR-30!"  I'm a pretty notey player so I quickly found myself burning through a few barrages of 16th notes to see what happened, and the initial impression was lukewarm.  I was on a challenging patch - a saxophone with note-bending and attack/legato enabled.  But I didn't want to jump to a conclusion too quickly; I knew I hadn't spent any time really tweaking the divided pick-up setup.

While fiddling around I stumbled upon a 12-string/Organ combination patch, and inadvertently was very inspired.  In a matter of minutes I had a whole guitar rhythm part worked out and was suddenly very excited to hook the unit up to Sonar to record the idea before it seeped out of my brain.  There I ran into my second stumbling block, where after installing the GR-55 USB driver I wasn't able to enable it in Sonar!  Since I had the song idea in my head (isn't this the whole reason I play music? Not just to fiddle with technology, but to PLAY and COMPOSE) I side-stepped the issue and recorded the GR-55 through the analog outputs.

I updated the GR-55 SW version to 1.02; no problems there, and it kept all the configuration settings.

I'm really excited to dig more into the COSM features.  The 12-string guitar was quite enjoyable.

My first pass through a smattering of the default patches resulted in some frustration. I wanted to quickly hear just a piano.  Or just the COSM modeling.  the default patches seem randomly strewn about the memory of the unit, with the three rough Lead/Rhythm/Other categories the only guide.

Configuring for the Godin LGX-SA

I found the following settings on the web at http://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php?topic=3965.0, and have applied them.  They definitely are helping with the tracking performance, but I have spent almost no time whatsoever playing with the unit once I applied these changes.  I tweaked the nuance settings to "4", but I'm not convinced I could really feel/hear a difference.

These are RMC's suggested settings for GR-55 with RMC Piezo pickups:
Richard McClish wrote>
"Thanks for your interest in RMC products.

Since you're using an RMC-equipped instrument, please find below a list of my current GK settings for your reference.

_____________________________________


GK SETTINGS  as of 4/05/11

"PU"
PU type ;  PIEZO R
Scale :  650 MM
PU phase : NORMAL
PU direction : NORMAL
S1/S2 position : NORMAL
MORM PU gain : 0 dB
PIEZO TONE  LOW  :    0
PIEZO TONE HIGH  :   +5

"DIS"
10.0 mm all strings

"SEN"
0  all strings

"VEL"
Velocity Dynamics :  6
Play-Feel         :  4
Low-Velocity Cut  :  5

"NUA"
Nuance Dynamics   :  5
Nuance Trim       :  5

"DOW"
Shift   :   0

__________________________________

Plan of Attack

I need to organize my thoughts to make sure I'm effectively using my time with the unit.  Here are few ideas I want to explore.

• Create a cello patch that is suitable for playing Bach Cello Suite.  The default patch I tried last night had way to much attack.
• Create a series of patches to isolate specific features such as
• COSM guitars and amps
• tracking under various conditions (chromatic, legato, bend type, velocity, nuance)
• play-through of the guitar's voices (midi, modeling, standard pick-ups)
• use of volume pedal for mixing, wah, synth parameters
• various PCM synth voices and combinations not found or not satisfactory in the default patches
• Explore why on most patches (but not all!) the bottom two strings seem to be way too high in the mix.
• Compose a little song that layers 3 parts and perform it "live" using the looper
• Arrange the D minor composition for the GR-55, utilizing a variety of patches to make it really sonically interesting.  Perhaps include a looper/solo section in the arrangement.
• Troubleshoot Audio USB driver
• Try out GR-55 as a midi controller using the USB driver and the standard midi cable.  Especially see if it tracks low notes significantly better than the GR-30
• Work on the melody of the 12-string idea I recorded last night
• Just play with the dang thing!

Okay, I should stop typing and see if I can get a little GR-55 time in before the end of the day!