Guitar Synthesizers

[Stratzrus]

I'm just starting to check this out.

I saw a demo of the SY-200 and was impressed with the electric organ sounds it could produce.



But I saw posts on here about the GM-800.

What's the difference? Are there other options out there?

The SY-200 is reasonably priced and can deliver some very good tones. Is the GM-800 that much better? What would I miss out that the 800 includes?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[DanRad]

My understanding is that SY-200 is an oscillator synth. It produces tones by applying various filters and settings to those oscillators. You can get decent tones, but they will sound "synthy" even at their best.

The GM-800 (which I own) uses samples, so it produces far more realistic strings, organs, horns and other sounds. It does require installing a special pickup on your guitar, and it doesn't blend the guitar's pickup sounds at all (though you can do that yourself depending on your rig).

It really depends on what you're going for. I wanted realistic-sounding horns, saxes and strings. If I just wanted an oscillator synth, I'd finally learn how to use the synth blocks on my Helix, but I have not gotten along with those well at all.

 

[Sascha Franck]

The SY-200 is reasonably priced and can deliver some very good tones. Is the GM-800 that much better?

They are both fundamentally different.

The SY series is taking your straight guitar signal (or a hex-pickup signal for being able to process each string separately) and manipulates it kinda like a sophisticated FX unit would, the outcome being synth-alike sounds.

The GM-800 however requires your guitar to be equipped with a hex-pickup (their GK models) - and, most importantly, it won't work with the guitar signal but convert each string into MIDI signals, which are then used to trigger, well, MIDI sounds - just as a keyboard would.

This is resulting in very different outcomes.

With the SY series, your playing technique will be more or less represented in the sound. You can do slurs, slides, rakes, scratches, whatever you do with normal guitar setups (some of these techniques may cause some artefacts, but basically it'll all work).

A guitar signal converted to MIDI however will not be suitable for many playing techniques. MIDI only knows pitch, volume, on/off and some controller messages. So that's what your guitar signal will be transformed into (ok, bends and vibratos can be preserved - but it's getting tough there already). Any typical guitar playing stuff will get lost. Slurs, rakes, slides, pinch harmonics (ok, they may partially work...) all have no place in the conversion process as there's basically no MIDI equivalent they could be transformed into.
And to make matters worse, instead of them just being ignored (some but not all stuff can be filtered out), these typical guitar techniques often cause "glitches" along the MIDI conversion process, resulting in weird notes and what not.
Which is, to make matters yet worse again, why you usually need to adjust your playing technique quite a bit for good results.
Also, MIDI conversion needs a full string amplitude cycle for the pitch to be analyzed properly, which is why conversion of lower notes will cause a noticeable latency. Not necessarily a showstopper but still pretty noticeable.

In case you don't want to think about adjusting your playing technique, the SY series are the way to go, if you want to play typical synth/sampler sounds, the GM-800 is your best bet - but it defenitely requires a GK pickup.

Hope that might clarify some things.

 

[Stratzrus]

With the SY series, your playing technique will be more or less represented in the sound. You can do slurs, slides, rakes, scratches, whatever you do with normal guitar setups (some of these techniques may cause some artefacts, but basically it'll all work).

It sounds like the SY-200 would be the better choice for me. I don't need to have access to the full range of tones the GM provides.

If I could just get that Hammond organ tone I heard in the video it would be worth the cost of the pedal to me. Anything else it does would be icing on the cake.

Back in the '60s I worked on the crew building the stage for the Philadelphia Music Festival. The Young Rascals were playing and during the day while we were setting up I saw Felix Cavaliere's Hammond B-3 sitting there on stage.

I couldn't resist so I went over, turned it on and hit a note.

The sound of that organ, going through the stadium's PA powered by 10 Macintosh power amps was absolutely stunning! I sat down and jammed on it for three or four minutes and no one said anything or tried to stop me.

Anyway, I've been in love with the sound of the B-3 ever since so if I could get that from a pedal it would be great. I don't know if the Fractal pedals do anything like that but I haven't heard any clips that were equally convincing.