Michael Paz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >Yea yea yea. We've heard it all before. Let me get my big violin out and >accompany you on this tired old song. There is nothing in the world like >an acoustic guitar, but this new fangled thing [VG-8] is so cool and so much deeper >than anyone has managed to express here as of yet. > > >on 4/20/02 2:44 PM, Jim L'Hommedieu (Lama) at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> I'm commenting today on Fred Simon's post. While I am hesitant >> to admit this because there are some very wise and talented >> people right here on this list who love the VG-8, I have to >> agree. Fred, you're talking like an audiophile here. This idea >> of tiny variations being missing is very hard to describe but >> it's real to me....
Don't get me wrong, I love synths, I have a dozen of them, and have used them for 20 years. They can be very cool, lots of colors and sounds at one's fingertips. Believe me, I use them all the time (almost always in conjunction with acoustic instruments, though). With the VG-8, guitarists can now catch up with keyboardists and get in on the fun. But sound, and the emotional/musical effect of sound, is made of information ... lots and lots of information, and the finer the resolution of the expression of that information, the deeper the emotional content of what is imparted. A synth's chips can hold only so much, and the sheer amount of nuance present in, say, ten seconds of a real acoustic or electric guitar performance would quickly fill up and overflow even the largest ROM/RAM blocks in the most high-end synth. When you get down to that microscopic level of detail and variation it's mind boggling how vast it is, but it is there that instrumental artistry resides. And this is not only perceived by audiophiles. It's true that given certain conditions on a recording, it may be difficult for untrained ears to distinguish between an acoustic instrument and its sampled counterpart, but that is an inherently false test; the whole point of acoustic instruments is that sound is produced by the mechanical manipulation of wood, wire, skins, felt, magnetic pickups, metal, and other materials that directly cause vibration of air molecules in the form of sound waves ... every single iteration of a note is different and that difference has musical, and thus emotional, meaning. Synths can only move air by electrical means, the same way a voice emits from a phone or a TV through its speaker; in this case, only the speaker is mechanically producing sound waves. The real test would be to compare side by side an acoustic instrument played in the same room as the listener with its sampled counterpart played over a high quality amplification system ... anyone with even modest listening skills would easily know the difference. -Fred
