Guitar Synth & MIDI

by Guitar Player Magazine and Various

Until recently, guitar players had reason to feel left out of the great electronic revolution in music today. After a few false starts and several years of development, however, the new technology has become an accessible and relatively inexpensive tool for the vast expansion of every guitar player's musical creativity. The development of both improved guitar synthesizers and of guitars as 'triggering' devices for MIDI setups, means players can now...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881885932
• ISBN13: 9780881885934
• Release Date: September 1988
• Publisher: Backbeat Books
• Length: 134 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 9.0" x 11.9"

Customer Reviews

Early Guitar Synth Treasure

This is a great resource, even now almost 20 years later. I play 2 different MIDI Guitars from the 80's and it helped me appreciate what I have and what other options there are out there still. Midi Synth guitar has some of the unique and rare guitars highlighted and reviewed in detail. This will help you if you have thought about buying an old synth ax on Ebay. Also very helpful are the detailed explanations of the technical aspects of midi synthesizer sounds, and interesting profiles on musicians. By the way I play a Jackson Charvel Electric Guitar with a Roland GK2 midi pickup through a Roland Midi Synth linked up to a Korg i40m midi unit. The sounds are awesome and great with our church praise band. I also play a Casio MG510 and it too is great with the Korg unit directly. With the late 80's midi guitars they are reasonable and still quite the cool thing. My son has a Casio DG10, and is hoping to upgrade to a DG20 (Flight of the Concords uses this). In case anyone hadn't figured out the reason for using midi guitars, it is the concept of having a guitar make about any sound imaginable or play about any instrument sound. People are blown away when I play an orchestra, panflute, church organ, banjo,.... on my six string electric. They keep looking around wondering where that sound is coming from.

A decent intro to combining guitar into electronic music

this book is very interesting in the fact that it discribes techniques used to integrate guitar into electronic music, kinda like some of the various NIN pieces we know and love... I recommend it, although it could go into more depth with a slightly easier to understand sentece structure