Slashdot Mirror

Since he plays guitar and sings he also needs the DAW to accept drivers for audio digital interface devices like MOTU or even Line 6. Without those, or without a simple way to get the software to work with them, you can't do anything reasonable with guitars or microphones. Just plugging into the computer's input gives shite sound quality which is why you need an interface.

I tried a couple years ago and gave up on Linux for recording. Someone suggested 'JACK' and Ardour but bloody hell, JACK was so convoluted and a pain to understand and never seemed to work or never worked simply, that I just said screw it and use Windows 7 with Cubase. My time is worth something too, and considering I already owned the Windows box, another 500 bucks for Cubase was a real deal compared to endless hours getting it to work on Linux (anything is easy if you know how, and I didn't know how on Linux, nor do I think it is worth the hours and hours of time to learn when I can just use something else that simply works). I want to play music when I record, not fuck around configuring the OS and drivers. On Windows I just installed the ASIO driver for my digital interface and selected it in Cubase and I was done. A couple minutes tops.

Until Linux gets its head out of its ass in terms of driver support (even if they are proprietary) I would stay well and gone away from it for recording. Unless you like spending more time configuring the workstation than actually recording stuff.

They are mostly talking about Reason. It's a software simulator for a bunch of real-life studio hardware that musicians used to have to purchase and hook up and find places to put. So, instead of having to spend $50,000 to outfit a studio with keyboards, synths, patch bays, mixers, effects, compressors, cables, etc., you can simulate it all with Reason for something like $450. But to the people in TFS, this is too much money still, and they would like to make a free equivalent. It's noble, but as others have mentioned there are other options that do not have nearly so polished and authentic sounds and interfaces, but are much cheaper or free.

I have a Line6 Pod 2 which sounds really damn close to a Marshal stack, specially through headphones. The Line6 stuff usually does a much better job at emulating analog gear than Beringher, whose products i always found way to sterile sounding.

Considering that the special thing for Apple is using generic terms and declaring them to be trademarked by virtue of attaching an i to the front, I don't think they have any right to pretend like they own the word "pod."

Especially when this was around long before Jobs even thought of getting into portable music devices.

until it has something like this. Something cheap and extremely usable.

until it has this. i.e. something this cheap and useful.

You could try a Line 6 UX1 or UX2. That may be what you are looking for. Reasonably priced for what they are, really. I;ve been thinking of picking one up myself ;-)

Who on earth needs a skillset like that?

Then, he will scoop up all of the unemployable engineers at slave labor wages, laughing the entire time while sitting atop his throne made of golden skulls. In fact, this article was probably penned while he sat atop said throne.

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids.

...And I guarantee that if we compared the pics between a film camera and a digital SLR, you either wouldn't be able to distinguish between the two, or you'd pick the digital photos as being the better of the bunch. Anyone who's worked in photography will tell you that digital is the only way to go.

Ken Rockwell disagrees. There are certainly still cases where film cameras are superior. DSLRs may be strictly superior for any point-and-shoot use, but that doesn't mean they're "the only way to go".

Ditto for tube amps...

• The majority of the brand-name amps are analog, and in the music biz image counts for as much as sound
• Indie bands which are just starting out can't afford brand-new equipment, so they end up with stuff that's 15+ years old (hence, analog).

Have you done any guitar amp price-shopping...ever? Bottom-of-the-line tube amps are way more expensive than solid state amps. Assuming that starting bands will use the cheapest equipment available, that would indicate that they will all use solid-state, because it is cheaper.

I guarantee you could get just as good a sound out of digital equipment as you can out of analog, but due to the nature of the music industry there isn't all that much demand for digital equipment. This is changing, of course, as more younger artists enter the business, and more and more technicians become comfortable working with digital equipment.

Tube amps are very complex systems electronically, so they sound different than solid-state amps. They tend to be perceived as more pleasant or "warm" because they distort very nonlinearly without any hard clipping (no "infinite frequency" behavior seen in digital circuitry). From what I hear, Line6 seems to be one of the larger players for guitar amps that simulate analog circuitry with digital circuitry. It's hard to convincingly emulate the analog sound with digital circuitry.

Furthermore, technicians being used to digital equipment really has nothing to do with tube amps. A guitarist can play through a tube amp, and then a technician can record that on a digital mixer into Pro Tools on a computer hard drive. It's not an issue of "out with the old, in with the new". It's an issue of knowing your tools and choosing the one that's most appropriate.

Line6 computer based devices, especially the GuitarPort. In addition to the drivers, there'll be lot of fun coding a replacement for the GearBox app for the effects :-)

Line6 computer based devices, especially the GuitarPort. In addition to the drivers, there'll be lot of fun coding a replacement for the GearBox app for the effects :-)

Line6 computer based devices, especially the GuitarPort. In addition to the drivers, there'll be lot of fun coding a replacement for the GearBox app for the effects :-)

My friend recently got a Variax modeling guitar and I got to play it the other day. It looks like a really basic electric, but it has individual pickups for each string and a really realistic synth computer inside that models all kinds of guitars and other stringed instruments. And this ain't no crappy MIDI guitar, it responds naturally to bends, harmonics, etc. It can also do on-the-fly alternate tunings, but without actually changing the physical tuning! It feels so weird playing an electric guitar with a whammy bar and the sound of a banjo coming out.

Then he set it up running into a pitch tracker outputting a sine wave, fed into a Marshal stack simulator. Try to beat that signal path!

That's pretty close to the way the Line6 Variax guitars work.

This is not news... Gibson is just copying Line6 http://www.line6.com/. Go to their site and watch the demos of their modeling guitars and amps. I have a high-end Line6 guitar that models many classics (like Gibsons) AND it came with software that lets me change not only tunings, but pickup position, body density, and a zillion other tweaks. These customizations then become available via a switch on the guitar. I can go from a Les Paul to a Marten to a drop-d strat to a C7 12-string and they all sound beautiful! Visit their site if you play guitar. (no I don't work for them I just love their products!)

You know, they have mods (is that short for modules or modifiers or modelers?) for guitars (to make them sound like particular amplifier/speaker systems), MIDIs that sound like violins or trumpets, RSS feeds that sound like robotic overlords ... I think the technology is already out there to change the quality of a human voice.

There must be more gamers using voice chat than guitar players buying amplifier modelers.

And soon we won't be able to play guitar either.

Line 6's Guitarport made me pick up the e-guitar again after many years of not playing. (It unfortunately also made me boot into Windows again).

The problem with the e-guitar is that to get the sound you want for many rock styles, you need to crank up your amp. Effect boxes help, and may be fine for practice, but you never get that sound of a Marshall at 10.
Guitarport is a cheap little box with a DSP that is plugged into the USB port. The software lets you choose from a wide variety of preset digital models of famous amps and effects (and you can save your own edits), and you can listen to it over headphones or your stereo at reasonable volume, but still sound "real".

The software is very easy to use, and you can purchase Rifftracker separately, which gives you drum tracks (sampled, and with "human-like" variations, not robotic drum machine tracks) to play along to, lets you record and arrange etc. It is not really useful for serious recording, but is very easy to use and lends itself very well to practicing guitar (instead of fiddling with the PC).

Line 6 also has a professional line of digital effects, amps, and guitars, but they are more expensive, and are not that great IMO for practicing/playing just for fun.

Line 6's Guitarport made me pick up the e-guitar again after many years of not playing. (It unfortunately also made me boot into Windows again).

The problem with the e-guitar is that to get the sound you want for many rock styles, you need to crank up your amp. Effect boxes help, and may be fine for practice, but you never get that sound of a Marshall at 10.
Guitarport is a cheap little box with a DSP that is plugged into the USB port. The software lets you choose from a wide variety of preset digital models of famous amps and effects (and you can save your own edits), and you can listen to it over headphones or your stereo at reasonable volume, but still sound "real".

The software is very easy to use, and you can purchase Rifftracker separately, which gives you drum tracks (sampled, and with "human-like" variations, not robotic drum machine tracks) to play along to, lets you record and arrange etc. It is not really useful for serious recording, but is very easy to use and lends itself very well to practicing guitar (instead of fiddling with the PC).

Line 6 also has a professional line of digital effects, amps, and guitars, but they are more expensive, and are not that great IMO for practicing/playing just for fun.

The following music company has had a "pod" out since around 1998/99, so I've been "pod"casting each time I plug my guitar in for over 6 years.
http://www.line6.com/products/pods/

I still don't understand why people call it podcasting at all.. it's not broadcasting anything. You're just downloading a file from a website. It also has nothing to do with the ipods anymore (like podcast.net.. you just click a link and download a soundclip in mp3 or wma). Nothing is actually being broadcast to your ipod.

I just bought a used Pod XT off eBay PodXT ...it has midi in/out. Could the m-audio products like this firewire interface be used hooked to the mac mini for input of guitar...etc.? I'm a noob guitarist..and very noob to how midi and computer capture works...but, if this would work...would be a neat setup.

First, it's a stupid name. Otherwise, the Jesusonic device looks interesting. I use an incredible device called the Pod XT that makes life very easy for recording, noodling around, or juicing up the amp. One of the things I wished was a way for people to program their own effects/amp modeling algorithms and let people share (or sell) them.

This gadget looks like it could make it happen. As far as how it looks, I'm sure it's a prototype which will eventually be a slick, portable gadget. I look forward to it.

Already use a form of RJ45 thats 'gig' gardened and supplies power to the computer section of this modelling guitar.

More info here

on a related note, check out: http://line6.com/VariaxAcousticPreview/

it's got alternate tunings built into it ( so it says )

Moreover, iTunes isn't the only "product-placement" in this article. They claim that Gibson will release the first digital guitar in January 2004 when the Variax has been on the market for a while now.

This ties in with the trend of virtual sound control in recent years. For example, Antares have the Microphone Modeller, which (I think) does a resonable job of turning your Shure 57 into a virtual vintage Telefunken U47. Line 6 have been doing amp modelling for years, and now they have the Variax, a guitar with built-in DSP to emulate the sound of other guitars. I can see session guitarists liking this, as long as the sound quality is up to scratch...

This ties in with the trend of virtual sound control in recent years. For example, Antares have the Microphone Modeller, which (I think) does a resonable job of turning your Shure 57 into a virtual vintage Telefunken U47. Line 6 have been doing amp modelling for years, and now they have the Variax, a guitar with built-in DSP to emulate the sound of other guitars. I can see session guitarists liking this, as long as the sound quality is up to scratch...

Line6 isn't the only one who does this. Roland/Boss has had amp/cab modelling features on their effects processors for years. Behringer and Digitech to name a couple more also have products with this feature.

Even more interesting is the Variax, a guitar that contains a software algorithm to model other guitars. Plugged in, the guitar can sound like a banjo, sitar, '58 Gibson Les Paul, Telecaster, Acoustic 12 string, you get the picture. As in the amps, its not 100% of the original, but this terrain is akin to where we were with computers in 1980.

Here is a more relevant link than the one listed in the article. But since Gibson's site seems to be taking a good slashdotting, here's a mirror of that page and one of the original, too (sorry, no graphics...site went down before I could get them).

Also, from what I'm inferring, this is kind of a ripoff of line6's guitars, which also use a hex pickup and do analog->digital conversion on chip inside the guitar (there's even some OSS software people have developed for the amps). So not really a new idea by any means, but certainly one that could stand to be made a bit more widespread.

Personally, I'd rather see the guitar be something that is a purely acoustic/analog instrument (who the hell wants to 'upgrade' a Gibson when the computing hardware becomes obsolete), and do all the digital effects on an actual computer, which will probably generate better sound given the greater amount of processing power.

The best makers of solid state tube imitations:
http://www.line6.com/main/main.cfm

But only insturment amps, not stereo amps.

Turns out they do.

I work at a place that is open 24 hours a day, I get full benefits (medical, dental, life insurance, and more), and make about $12 an hour plus profit sharing. And, the more profitible locations are ALWAYS looking for computer savy people.

My job duties include working with multiple platforms (Win, Mac, Solaris), doing all kinds of geeky stuff as a computer service specialist.

Plus, most importantly, you meet anyone who is anyone in the local companies ... I am on a first name basis with most of the top brass at a huge biotech company, several aerospace companies, a really cool, really geeky engineering department in the music industry, and just about anywhere else worth working in my area.

I get job offers all of the time, but am holding off until I finish school.

Read the manual on this beast. Very cool.

Read the manual on this beast. Very cool.

More to the point, there is plenty of solid state amplification going on in guitars, both 100% and partial (all modern tube amps have solid state components), see for just one example Line 6.

Finally, this is jsut a totally different issue. It isn't about amplification. This is about getting signals -any signals, not just guitars -to the mixing board. That's it. In the end of course how well the software maintains and presents the signal will determine if it is adopted. They say it is "cleaner" - in my book this often means they've cut off the top and bottom of the signal, eliminating a lot of signal with the noise and making for a flatter, less rich sound. And this is what's wrong with the assumption that digital is necessarily better than analog. People say, a CD samples at a higher rate than the ear can perceive, therefore anyone who says the digital signal is lacking is an idiot. No: but how the format and processing of the signal and how it is presented by playback equipment can have a serious effect on how much and exactly what is included and excluded from the raw input. Do it very well and you have a faithful reproduction, but with most of the annoying artifact noise removed. Do it poorly and you have the first CD release of Pink Floyd's Meddle. My brother made me a cassette from a 5+ year-old second-hand LP and it sounded better. Noisier, but better. This is why many early digital amps failed. Their signal was flat, thin, dull, the early attempts to model tube effects were crude.

Check out the Pod from Line6. This sucker is amazing. It emulates a half a dozen classic tube amps with extreme accuracy. The response is lifelike - bear down on the string and it crunches, pick lightly and it rings. When you change amp settings, the control knobs re-configure to match the amp you've chosen.

Check out the Pod from Line6. This sucker is amazing. It emulates a half a dozen classic tube amps with extreme accuracy. The response is lifelike - bear down on the string and it crunches, pick lightly and it rings. When you change amp settings, the control knobs re-configure to match the amp you've chosen.