Fractal Talk

[synthpenguin]

yeah, I don't understand the resistance to the advanced controls at all.

they're on separate, clearly labeled pages you can totally ignore.

the fractal amps sound great without touching them. it's not like "oh wow this sounds awful so I guess I have to understand what power tube bias excursion is".

and if you DO want to go to those pages—maybe for fun, or maybe because you have settings you love, but you want that extra 1%—you actually don't have to know what they do. it's a digital model: you won't break anything. you can just mess with them all and have fun, and if it sounds bad, turn it back or reset the whole channel.

if you're not interested in knowing what x or y does, that's fine (most "pro guitarists" don't either; even a lot of them who did experiment with these things were blindly messing with real gear and breaking it all the time lol), but you don't even have to know to turn the knobs and flip the switches.

like unless you're a pro sound designer (in which case you wouldn't be having these misgivings), it's supposed to be fun to do this stuff. or at least inspiring and creative! a lot of people seem to (inadvertently) set themselves up for frustration and option paralysis by digging into aspects they don't have to and they don't enjoy (see also: people who get overwhelmed by large IR collections, but then create and load large IR collections anyway).

not to be too harsh (I don't mean it that way), but... after going away from guitar for a while, fully going into synths, and then coming back to guitar, it's pretty apparent how many (online) guitarists are really obsessed with finding ways to enjoy their gear and setups less or make them less fun to use. I don't get it at all.

 

[synthpenguin]

In light of the recent synth patch talk here, it would be really cool to see Fractal add a polyphonic "synth" effect like what was added in today's Fender Tone Master Pro update or the Boss HRM stuff found on their SY and older GP series. The idea being that instead of detecting pitch* and having an oscillator follow that, it's directly shaping the sound source (i.e. guitar) into a synth-like sound, meaning that latency is very low (and presumably this is much less resource-intensive too).

*I believe the post-GP generations of Boss's work here does do some sort of polyphonic pitch detection in order to separate notes for polyphony without relying on a hexaphonic pickup. Fender is presumably taking a similar approach.

 

[BROCKSTAR]

In light of the recent synth patch talk here, it would be really cool to see Fractal add a polyphonic "synth" effect like what was added in today's Fender Tone Master Pro update or the Boss HRM stuff found on their SY and older GP series. The idea being that instead of detecting pitch* and having an oscillator follow that, it's directly shaping the sound source (i.e. guitar) into a synth-like sound, meaning that latency is very low (and presumably this is much less resource-intensive too).

*I believe the post-GP generations of Boss's work here does do some sort of polyphonic pitch detection in order to separate notes for polyphony without relying on a hexaphonic pickup. Fender is presumably taking a similar approach.

Yeah as I mentioned in the other thread, mooer ge-300, eventide h90, all the boss sy pedals, ehx synth pedals and now TMP etc.. We're hitting the age where polyphonic without hex pickup should be no excuse anymore in anything coming out. The power and evidence is already here for it.

The thing I'd like to see though is more versions of it. Give us granular synth, wave synthesis, fm synthesis, vector synthesis etc.. However those kind of powers may be still long off!

 

[synthpenguin]

Yeah as I mentioned in the other thread, mooer ge-300, eventide h90, all the boss sy pedals, ehx synth pedals and now TMP etc.. We're hitting the age where polyphonic without hex pickup should be no excuse anymore in anything coming out. The power and evidence is already here for it.

Yeah, I think the key is really the approach. The Boss / Fender approach to it gets over a lot of the issues that come with actually tracking pitch and then using that to control synth voices. It does end up limited in other ways, but I think the result is "good enough" for a lot of guitar synth purposes.