Composing the sounds of an animal’s life cycle and ultimate consumption into a musical portrait, Matthew Herbert’s “One Pig” is in turns grotesque and sentimental, rock and opera. I expected squeamishness and vegetarian conversions when I saw it on tour, but instead, the crowd eagerly devoured the creature at the end. (Make of that what you will.)

One Pig is in Manchester, UK tonight before continuing to Brighton and Portugal.

As my own incurable appetite is for musical instruments, for me a highlight of the show is Scotland-based, American artist Yann Seznec’s Sty Harp. (See also our coverage of his iPad music game development work.) Gut strings in historical instruments already make use of animal parts, so a stringed instruments seems appropriate. But by dissecting obsolete, forgotten technology – a bit of a theme in these parts lately – Yann is able to make an effective, expressive instrument.

Sadly, there’s not much video of the instrument in action, but seeing it is a highlight of the live show. Yann’s performance has its own theatricality, rocking out on these extended strings around the “pig pen” like a boxer swinging against the ropes of a ring. First, Yann shares some notes on the show itself:

The album is an elegy to a life lived for the benefit of humans and raises complex questions about our relationship to these often-maligned and misunderstood creatures.

The album is made entirely out of sounds from the pig and its surroundings – the first squeals, the sound of it being alone for the first time, and the dripping of its blood after being butchered. The result is a delicate, beautiful, and occasionally terrifying musical composition with a profundity rarely heard in electronic music.

The live show debuted at the Royal Opera House, London, in September 2011 and has since toured the world, performing at Berghain Berlin, STRP Eindhoven, Club Silencio Paris, Liquid Room Tokyo, Ancienne Belgique Brussels, and more. Future dates include headlining at Future Everything in Manchester, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

The show explores and questions the life, death, and consumption of the pig. A chef cooking onstage brings the sound and smell of cooking pig, and the performance features a brand new custom instrument – the “Sty Harp”, built and performed by Edinburgh-based artist Yann Seznec. This representation of the pig’s home is used to trigger and control elements of music, forming an integral part of the 5 piece band. The rest of the band is comprised of Sam Beste on keyboards, Tom Skinner on SPDS, Hugh Jones on samplers, and Matthew on various keyboards and samples and things.

Yann explains how the instrument itself is constructed:

In terms of the Sty Harp, the instrument is built using hacked Gametraks, which were a failed proto-motion controller from around 2003. They were sold only in the UK, and worked by using two joysticks with strings attached that you clipped onto your hands. These could then sense the distance and vague location of your hands …a few terrible games were released on PS2, Xbox, and PC for the Gametrak before they were pulled from the market.

In any case, I took apart a whole load of these (I probably have owned more gametraks than anyone in the world, ever) and used their innards for the string/joystick controllers, which are totally great! I built a whole system with Jon (from Lucky Frame) to hook up twelve of these controllers into my computer at once. I’m using an Arduino with a mux shield to handle the 36 analog inputs (x/y/string for 12 controllers) at once, converting them into MIDI and sending them over to Ableton.

In Ableton the controllers are doing a number of different things, slightly different for each song. In the Max patch I made I can send out 5 individual MIDI notes from each string, one for general movement above a threshold, and one each for a push, pull, up, or down movement. These movements are also sending out CC values, as is the pulling of the string. So each string controller is sending a whole pile of MIDI data at all times, and I pick and choose for each song which gestures to use. So in some cases I’m just triggering individual sounds using the strings, but in others I am using some strings to trigger clips, others to control effects on those clips, and still other effects to do master play/stop/effects/etc.

The climax of the Sty Harp happens about 2/3rds of the way through the show, when the whole band joins me in the sty for the symbolic butchering of the pig. For that song each band member controls different strings, building a huge sound wall.

You can read more about my building of the sty harp here: http://theamazingrolo.net/styharp/

We’re playing in Manchester on Friday the 18th, Brighton on Monday the 21st, then in Lisbon on June 29th and Porto on June 30th.

http://www.matthewherbert.com/
Matthew Herbert – One Pig: exclusive album stream [The Guardian]

Music trade shows are typically full of sensible and useful instruments. They may not always represent something revolutionary, but people find homes for them in their musical lives. Of course, the world’s fair futurist in us may want something really different.

It was a real treat to get my hands on the AlphaSphere, a UK-engineered alternative instrument that maps pitch across touch-sensitive surfaces arrayed in a sphere. It’s what a lot of people were talking about at Messe when people asked “what’s cool?”, as friends rounded up friends to march them over to the booth. (It’s Hall 5.1, stand C27 if you happen to be there this weekend.) The rubbery round sensors are actually really fun to play. I’m not quite ready to sign up for all-spherical playing, but it was a crowd-pleaser, and it’s great to experience a different way of playing.

I hope to catch up with these lads from Bristol either in the UK or back in Berlin, but in the meantime, check out Keyboard Magazine’s video of the demo. It’s not as slick as the promo video, but you get a sense of the co-inventor’s real enthusiasm. (I shot the video as I’m contributing to Keyboard‘s Messe coverage.)

More:
http://www.alphasphere.com/

Previously (not spheres, but a similar idea – minus the continuous pressure):
Dodecahedronists, Unite: An Audiovisual Controller, Gestures and Polyhedra, Open Hardware

Official video (I like the white):

Look around the room you’re in. Drum your fingers against some of the objects around you. Now imagine that you could turn those touches into any imaginable sound – and all you’d need to play them is a single contact mic. And we’re not talking just simplistic sounds – think expressive, responsive transformation of the world around you, all with just that one mic, thanks to clever gestural recognition.

Bruno Zamborlin has made that idea a reality, with hold-onto-your-chair results. It’s not available yet for public consumption, but it’s coming.

Bruno explains to CDM:

Mogees is a novel way for transforming any surface into a musical instrument.

By putting a (very cheap) contact microphone over a surface, the software can recognise different types of touch and associate them with different synthesisers.

Users can train the software with their own ‘gestures’, using both bare hands and objects. In the video demo we put the microphone over different surfaces such as kitchen tables and balloons.

The sound synthesis is based on two different techniques:

1 – physical modeling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws. Different materials can be simulated, such as membranes, strings, tubes and plates

2 – mosaicing, that works as follow: first, users load a sound folder; then, the noise coming from the microphone is analysed and the software continuously finds and plays its closest segment within the sound folder.

Mogees has not been realised yet. It could be published as Max4Live patch in some month.

Yes, we’ll be watching for future versions and publication, with bated breath and eager hands.

http://www.brunozamborlin.com/mogees

Update: Readers point to similar earlier work; obviously, contact mics have long been readily available. I’m not always concerned with whether something is new or not – old and cool can be cool. But what does appear to be new here is the additional gestural analysis to work more accurately with location. That takes an existing technique and refines its musicality. -PK

From comments on the Eigenharp round-up, I think this is simply beautiful. I also think it will be the video to which I link people whenever comments get out of hand. (Heck, I may refer myself.)

“Music to soothe the savage commenter?”

Back to the music:

First entry to the Eigenharp ALPHA competition.
A small piece created on the TENORI-ON, from my new show Ti-To-Tis – Dance and Music for Babys.
(babies from 0 to 3 years listen to live acoustic and electronic music, “dance” with two dancers and “play” with an actor/ puppetier, all around a magic clock; Ti-To-Tis – magical lights, ilusions and fantasy on a comfortably atmosphere.

http://www.passosecompassos.pt/dancarte/index2.html

There’s one dislike on YouTube, which makes me think some people either hate happiness, or miss when clicking the thumbs-up sign. (Maybe they’re from a culture where thumbs down is good.) Also, I dare you to “dislike” the following composition (though we may need a new body of work for a Well-Tempered Eigenharp):

Thanks, Zero Reference!

Amidst the general-purpose computing platforms (laptop, iPad), and latest iterations of the conventional synthesizer (keyboard, knobs), the quest to build something genuinely specific, self-contained, and unique drives on. These creations are strange breeds, evolutionary singularities that aim to embody something the more generic instruments of our age lack: personality and soul. They’re the kind of object you might want to practice for years, to treat in their digital, “post-mechanical” form the way you would a violin or piano. They have a feel, more than the smooth surface of a trackpad or plane of multitouch glass, something that pushes back when you push it.

And while many such creations have shown up in proof-of-concept demos and academic conferences, the Eigenharp is an instrument a small but growing community of players are embracing in the long haul.

Musician and Eigen advocate Geert Bevin is back with the latest round of updates as those players hone their chops and try to really master their Eigen playing. And if you want to get involved yourself, there’s even a regular, Web-based clubhouse, thanks to Google’s fledgling “Hangout” technology on Google+. Geert tells us:

Independently from Eigenlabs, Eigenharp players are now organizing a clubhouse, twice a week, on opposite times to allow everyone to join at one point or another. This happens on Monday at 4PM CEST (Europe) and Wednesday 4PM CDT (US), using Google+ Hangouts. I’m hosting the European one and it’s streamed and recorded on Livestream
People that interested in the Eigenharp are invited to join one of the hangouts and circle me or Larry Heilman on Google+ to get access.

Now, some of the artists videos, in a wide survey Geert has put together that spans genres.

António Machado (Portugal) used his Eigenharp Alpha during the INCastelo open-air show with dancers in a medieval castle.

Here is what António has to say about this performance: “I compose music and take care of sound design for most of the dance shows from DançArte and we were in the two final shows of the cycle ‘In/Out’ focusing on local architecture and their surroundings. The ‘In’ part in August, outdoors and the ‘Out’ part inside a traditional theatre. Planning ten months ahead, August 2011 would bring us to Palmela´s medieval Castle built in the year 1150, to get inspired by and ultimately create “In Castelo”. Again the choice of performing with the Alpha suited me perfectly. It is visually stunning, so I was able to connect with the audience through the lights, using the “Arranger” and was free to interact with the surroundings, the dancers and their choreography. I have a very high degree of control over each sound/sample/AU or iVST and effects used, right from the instrument, so I don’t need to look at the computer screen while performing”

http://www.youtube.com/user/palaires

BangStrokeBlow (UK) live with an original instrumental:

BangStrokeBlow is a London-based duo of Eigenharpists; they make infectious, dance floor-oriented, experimental music. They retain many of the sensibilities of modern electronica but through the Eigenharp, have developed a much more expressive and human way of performing this music live. Expect anything from Hip Hop to Breakbeat to Trance; every single note will eat away at your internal organs, in a fuzzy, buzzy, rapturous way.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BangStrokeBlow
http://www.myspace.com/bangstrokeblow
https://www.facebook.com/bangstrokeblow
http://soundcloud.com/bangstrokeblow

Dino Soldo (UK) has used the Eigenharp for the 2010 world tour of Leonard Cohen:

Here’s what he had to say during an interview: “I can be onstage just with this, the computer on the side and my horns. That’s my fantasy. The visual is everything… Being on stage is a fantasy and this contributes to that fantasy. I wanna get rid of my keyboards. I wanna have a whole side of my stage disappear. Make the stage a little cleaner. There’s enough buttons for me to get everything I wanna have happen, happen. Really all you have to do is get your brain situated around the Eigenharp, then the Eigenharp is ready to go… The possibilities are truly endless. It really allows me to do things that I wouldn’t normally do with a solo instrument.”

http://www.dinosoldo.com
http://twitter.com/dinosoldo
http://www.myspace.com/dinosoldo
http://www.facebook.com/DinoSoldo

Flytecase (Belgium) live with an original song, “Same Place Again”:

Flytecase is a Belgian alternative pop-rock band, they used the Eigenharp Alpha for most synth arrangements on their debut album ‘Speaker Mind’ and are now preparing a new live show that uses the Eigenharp on stage. This is one of the finished songs, written on the Eigenharp and performed live in Charleroi, Belgium during the Fêtes de Wallonie Festival.

http://www.flytecase.be
http://www.facebook.com/flytecase
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B56CEC9C692B36B2
http://twitter.com/flytecase

Ian and Paul Harriman (UK) using AudioCubes and Eigenharp at Electro-Music 2011 festival:

Ian and Paul Harriman using AudioCubes and Eigenharp at Electro-Music 2011 festival [Percussa (AudioCubes) blog]

Paul Harriman has played the Eigenharp Alpha for two years in a row at the Electro-Music festival and performed a piece together with his son on Audiocubes this year. As well as playing leads and pads live on the Alpha, all the backing tracks are also triggered and controlled by the Eigenharp.

http://www.harriman4.com

Kayla Kavanagh (UK) live with an original song, “Take me home”:

Kayla is a Yorkshire-based singer-songwriter who plays nine instruments. She started a year and a half ago with the Eigenharp Pico and has since then moved on to the Eigenharp Alpha. Her last album is one of the world’s first to feature the Eigenharp. Kayla played at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival with her first original song on the Eigenharp Alpha.

http://www.kaylakavanagh.com
http://www.youtube.com/kaylakavanagh
http://twitter.com/KaylaKavanagh
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kayla-Kavanagh/22032129016

Thanks for this, Geert! This covers quite a range; it seems that you’re bound to find something that sparks interest. If others would like to do a similar round-up for an alternative instrument/controller, I’m all ears.

Alternative key layouts have popped up in commercial hardware and now iPad apps and such, but there’s nothing like trying to build something to grasp how it works. An intrepid group of makers who call themselves Louisville Soundbuilders are working now to clone the C-Thru Music AXiS-64. The goal: their own, original instrument that uses the isomorphic array of keys the AXiS does, which by organizing notes by harmonic interval makes complex melodies and harmonies much simpler than on traditional fretted instruments and keyboards.

You can see results in the video. (It doesn’t make sound until the very end. This is how instrument building goes — dedicate months to build, then months more to practice!) The discussion of how it’s made is especially interesting, and offers some tips to people who are building entirely different devices – check out what they learned about switches and velocity sensing. See the forum:
Soundbuilders Discussion

Thanks, Nick Sturtzel, for sharing your work.

And that really brings us to the value of cloning.

To me, the presence of these DIY boards shouldn’t detract from the value of C-Thru’s product. C-Thru’s gear is superb, and clearly, a lot of their market wants a pre-built project and not a few months in a local hacklab. In fact, clones could add value rather than subtract: by putting these instruments in the hands of people who can’t afford the C-Thru, the project helps evangelize isomorphic layouts. The real challenge for clever key layouts has been that their use is so limited, which means you never get a chance to build a scene and a practice around their musical application. Lastly, as the exploration of switches and velocity shows, building a clone of something else and getting involved in how something is made can yield entirely new designs – especially since this is a group of hacker musicians, not a factory making knock-offs.

I’ll be interested to see how this goes … and now I’m curious to build something like this.

Bonus points to this group for being from my hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. (I was born and raised, before moving to New York. If I ever move to Baltimore, I’ll have the Triple Crown.) For the correct pronunciation, think not how the French who settled it would speak, but instead imagine stuffing a pile of these keys in your mouth, and try to say “Louisville.”

In fact, that “lvl1.org” domain isn’t really even some hacker thing. “lvl” is probably the proper way to spell what people in Kentuckiana actually say. Hope I get to come visit folks in Louisville soon; it’s always good to come home.

Moving beyond touching a screen as two-dimensional plane, Roger Linn’s concept music controller, the Linnstrument, adds tactile response and expression. Roger calls it “3D Note Expression,” but in lay terms, it means pushing harder on the controller makes it respond differently, as you’d expect from a physical instrument.

Roger this week posts an update on how his development is going and what he imagines – good timing, as this week we also saw another design on the same lines, the Soundplane. The sensing methods are different, enough so that I can easily see room for both, but the upshot is the same. Randy Jones in that story also reflects that, once these things are invented, what will really be essential is musicians to play the things and develop lots of interesting software that can use the controllers. See, previously:

A Glimpse of the Soundplane Controller, Innovative Tactile Multi-Touch, in the Lab; Call to Action

The major change in Roger’s latest update, apart from adjusting the form factor to something longer and more spacious, is the addition of different overlays, including traditional keyboard “manuals,” fret-style grids, and honeycomb-patterns hexagonal grids like the one at top.

It isn’t just a blank slate any more – certainly not in Roger’s mind, at least. Linn, a guitarist by training, has an extensive schema worked out for a grid that would function like the frets on a guitar neck. Movements in any direction can make an adjustment, impacting timbre (perpendicular to the front edge), pitch bends (parallel to that edge), and loudness (pressure).

It’s still all concept, with one working prototype; Roger’s professed style is to work in big-picture concepts. But I’d love to see some of these ideas reach fruition.

I’m still hopeful that a simple, inexpensive, open source option could evolve from this landscape. I hope for that not necessarily even because of a philosophical belief in open source so much as the sense that such an open field could lend itself to experimentation by, say, the people who read this site, not only in creating software but building the instruments. In the case of Roger’s design, unlike the more novel approach used by Randy, patent questions are less of an issue. And a community of people experimenting in such a way could simultaneously yield software that could be compatible with the proprietary and commercial projects.

Lots more ideas and reflections – including detailed notions of how you’d play this thing – on Roger’s site:
Preview: LinnStrument – A New Musical Instrument with 3D Note Expression

And here’s a new video, entitled, cheerily, “Gloomy Sunday” (the music of Rezső Seress):

For review, Roger’s original demo video:

On tablets, on displays, multi-touch control these days is calibrated largely as a software interface – more Starship Enterprise panel than violin. As such, it works well for production tools and exploring compositional ideas. But it falls far short of being an instrument: even on the much-hyped iPad, touch timing and sensitivity is too imprecise, and the absence of tactile feedback and real, kinetic resistance makes you feel like an operator rather than a musician.

Several projects in experimental instrument research seek to change that. But of all of them, the one that has generated the most enthusiasm is Randy Jones’ Soundplane, co-developed with hardware designer Brian Willoughby. CDM shares a conversation today with Randy about his brilliant Aalto synth, and I’m working on a review soon. But wonderful as Aalto is, many of us are still eager to hear more of the Soundplane controller. I chose to wax poetic and optimistic back in December of 2008:
Intimate Control: Multi-Touch, New Models, and What 2009 is Really About

I shouldn’t have put a year on my predictions, though – good things take time. (If I could clearly recall what happened in 2009, maybe my general prediction was correct. The past tends to blur together for me into a continuum in the manner of the modern technologist, a vague assemblage of stuff that happened in the 60s with things that are actually still in the future.)

The good news: Randy continues working on the Soundplane, and Aalto will help.

Continuing our interview, here are the thoughts most relevant to Soundplane — and a glimpse of what it’s looking like as he works on it in the lab.

First, Randy explains his ideas about running a small business, continuing what he had to say in our Aalto story. The basic idea: Aalto’s software will bootstrap Soundplane’s hardware.

I think the whole idea of venture capital is sort of a poisonous one. It’s a little like bands wanting to get signed right away. The first thing you want to focus on is giving up your autonomy, really?

Instead, why not scrape together whatever you can from friends or family and just make something that you can sell right away, however small. I didn’t have enough saved to finish the Soundplane project so halfway through I switched to putting out Aalto as a plan B for paying the rent. Now it’s out and it’s a product I’m proud of that I think reflects where we’re coming from, and it’s going to fund Soundplane development, and it’s letting tons of people know we exist. Just get a foot in the door, do something useful.

He also shares his feelings about patents:

Some people won’t like to hear this, but I applied for a patent on the sensor used in the Soundplane. I know, the patent system is totally broken, and often, if not usually, used in stupid ways. But if there’s one thing I think it is actually good for, it’s to protect small companies like ours that innovate against a bigger entity simply stealing their R&D. This is why it was designed, right? I don’t know if our patent will save the day if such a thing ever happens, but if it does I’d much rather have one than not. It’s a pain to write one but it’s not impossible, you just need a lot of patience. “Patent it Yourself“, Nolo Press, is a good reference.

The patent question raises some additional questions for me – in fact, I’d love to see open source hardware that’s also backed by patent protection, in the same way that the GPL license is made tenable largely through the existence of traditional copyright laws.

But I do tend to agree that in the case of a truly novel technology, which this is, patent protection may be necessary. The question for projects like this will be whether to operate as a conventional, patent-protected design, or whether some sort of open source model with a patent covenant and a copyleft license like GPL will make sense — both preventing exploitation and allowing free experimentation. If there are any IP lawyers lurking around out there, let us know (I have some contacts, too); and definitely let us know if that’s a conversation you’d like us to continue.

In the meantime, the important thing is that Soundplane lives, and using Aalto could help it come to fruition. We’ll absolutely keep you posted.

As proof, though, more shots from the lab:

Also, must-read article from shortly after Jones’ NIME presentation:
Why Soundplane?

The whole article is worth reading, but Jones argues that not only is it likely many people will try to do tactile multi-touch, but it may be necessary. For those of you not all that good at hardware design, you could be just as essential as well to there being any future for these curiosities. The designers need other designers. The hardware needs software creators – lots of them. The software creators need to try lots of ideas. And everybody needs players, composers … users.

It’s all-too-tempting to sit back on the Web and marvel at what everyone else is doing, to take their genius and novelty as an engraved invitation to give up on your own work. “It’s been done before.” “Someone else is already doing this.” It’s probably a topic for a dedicated article, but it’s simply the wrong reaction. “It’s been done before — maybe it’s worth doing. Or doing again. Or doing better. Or doing over and over again.” “Other people are doing this — that means I have someone else to do it with.”

Historically, revolutions aren’t solo pieces. They’re ensembles.

Updated: speaking of work being ensembles, while Randy’s name is most associated with the Soundplane project, credit is due to hardware designer Brian Willoughby, who did the hardware design for the instrument. As he wrote in comments on CDM in 2010, when we covered Roger Linn’s Linnstrument: “For my part, I’ve been deep into the process of designing the analog circuits, DSP hardware and firmware necessary for the product, so it’s nice to poke my head up for a moment and see interest on this site, as well as to hear about other engineers trying new things and inspiring ideas.”

Science and art alike demand inquisitive exploration and experimentation. So, it’s encouraging that a discussion of the future of the digital guitar here on CDM brings impassioned reader debate. There’s some consensus if you dig through our comments: guitarists are compelled by adventures in new technology, and there’s widespread hope that new tech could expand guitar technique and expression, rather than (as the “Auto-Tune” name has unfortunately come to mean) a replacement for musicianship. And yes, there’s excitement about what Antares is doing – just as it’s possible to go beyond the status quo applications of their vocal tech.

But wait — there’s more.

Reflections on conservatism and guitar tech adoption Rich of Way Music sends over an extended, thoughtful rant, inspired by the discussion and directed at his fellow guitarists:
Amongst the guitar players: conservative fetishization and its discontents ;^) [Way Music]

The payoff of guitar research: Adrian Freed of the University of California Berkeley’s CNMAT research center reminds us that the research work with Gibson continues – and fruits of that research appear in products:

Thanks Peter for the mention of our work at CNMAT, UC Berkeley.
Our interactions with Gibson are ongoing and we continue to appreciate their commitment to innovation.
I am regularly confused by the lens used to talk about our research work, i.e., “Where is the product? Where are the adopters?” Good research rarely results in particular products although products are sometimes good demonstration vehicles for new ideas. Our work (as with much of UC Berkeley’s research) is more likely to sneak up on you over decades as an enabling part of the infrastructure, e.g. the first audio plugin, OSC (used in TUIO), pressure-sensing multitouch (next gen. Kindle?), Ethernet EVB, RISC (in ARM), BSD UNIX (part of OS/X), RAID etc. Watch out for how our work at the PARLAB will enable multicore efficiency for audio and music applications. There are lots of acronyms becoming part of mainstream tools already in that project….

I was going to start hyperlinking those acronyms, but I’m afraid you’ll have to Google them.

Why digital guitars matter: The Auto-Tune teaser brought about concerns about automatic intonation. (I do hear from guitarists that they’re really fond of the new automatically-tuning Gibson “robot” guitar!)

But there’s another side to the ability to track guitar pitch, and that’s the ability to combine the guitar with the sonic powers of the computer. Keyboardists have had the lion’s share of the fun over the years with software synths; just as wind, breath, and vocal controllers open up new possibilities, so, too, do MIDI guitars. While possible with any guitar that can send control, Starr Labs have posted some intriguing demos to their blog; see top and below. (I talked about Starr back in January as they introduced new controllers and guitars.)

Starr blog: http://starrlabs.blogspot.com/

And yes, you can play the digital guitar and still win a best beard contest with your more folk-oriented colleagues.

I really enjoy the Ztar guitar playing techniques. I’d love to see this in action in a performance, so readers – whatever make of MIDI guitar you may be using – do send those in.

I’m not as concerned about the conservatism, real or perceived, of any one artist. I’ll say this: regardless of the instrument, there’s vast untapped potential in new instruments and controllers waiting for brave artists to try to tap. And all of this can still draw upon knowledge and skill in traditional instruments. With a few thousand years of instrumental history at our backs, I’d say there’s no rush.

We just need a better term than “alternative controllers” or “controllerism.”

Maybe … music?

A new tool could be for the expressive, not just the lazy. That’s the read of Auto-Tune for guitar, and it makes me excited to see what people will do with it. It could be the advent of the true digital guitar.

Antares teased their efforts to bring Auto-Tune technology to guitars earlier this month, having gotten as far as working proof-of concept. (See Harmony Central’s exclusive video above, and Axetopia, Synthtopia.) I hadn’t worked out anything intelligent to say about it, perhaps because I was cowering in a corner in fear.

As a technologist, I have great respect for what Antares does, and their portfolio goes far beyond just the flagship vocal pitch correction. But suffice to say, Auto-Tune has been used in recording in some pretty unpleasant ways – the fault of the user, not the software, I’d argue. It’s regularly applied in order to suck the life out of great, perfectly-tuned singers, as well as to cover for people who can’t really sing, to the point that producers seem to not understand what the sound of a human voice is in all its complexity. (Case in point: Glee. The talented cast sounds incredible live and onstage, and like they have android stand-ins when they’re on the show. In fact, if you disagree with those uses, please – go use some of Antares’ terrific software for good, not evil, and I’ll write about it.)

Auto-Tune as a name, then, has come to symbolize a revolution, an extraordinary blockbuster of software – and the butt of a joke. So, it’s hard not to see a product called “Auto-Tune for Guitar” and carry some of that bias. Sometimes, as writers we actually need our readers to add some perspective.

Auto-Tune for Guitars could likewise be misused to smooth out some of the guitar’s natural intonation subtleties, though I think the danger is far less so than it is with the voice. But it’s more than that.

Reader Jesse Engel reflects on what it could mean. He notes that the significant advance is building the intelligence into the guitar, not just the computer, and that applications could be varied:

Don’t know if you saw this, but Antares has taken a fresh swipe at HEX guitar, putting a processor in the guitar and using it to do some more modern (Auto-Tune, emulation, etc.) processing. [Ed.: Hex refers to the practice of adding individual pick-ups to each of six strings. -PK]

The hex has been around for a while, but it’s a big deal to use it in this way for guitarists since you don’t need to try to do any polyphonic pitch recognition. Literally direct note access. Also, signals add nonlinearly, so effecting each string individually has a different sound than doing emulation on the mix.

The tech looks like it will help a lot of people fake being better than they are (especially bending to the right note), at the expense of the beautiful imperfections of great playing, but the potential of using hex pickups in these new ways is fun to think about.

The digital guitar has been a vision for a long time, from working out MIDI output to multichannel output. Gibson has been the name behind many of those efforts. Back in January 2004, Wired ran a glowing portrait of Gibson’s efforts in print:

The 100-Megabit Guitar: Gibson’s maverick CEO wants to shove Ethernet up your ax and rock the music world. [Wired 12.1]

It’s worth reading the whole article; the technical limitations of the Gibson system immediately come to light. Suffice to say, that vision never quite came to fruition; Wired even this year claimed that the project had been killed – at least at Gibson. None other than Adrian Freed, OpenSoundControl and alternative instrument design guru at the University of California Berkeley’s CNMAT research center, led the group – he, his colleagues, and his many students go right on innovating with or without Gibson. Updated: I’m not able to find the reference for that story, which I read in print. See comments for commentary by Adrian Freed, who sees otherwise.

At the time, CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, oddly speaking in the third person, pronounced, “Progress will happen. If Henry Juszkiewicz didn’t build a digital guitar, I can assure you the digital guitar would still happen.” That prediction may prove prescient.

The 2007 video below shows the debut of Gibson’s HD.6x-Pro Digital Les Paul – working with individual strings. I also saw a demo with Gibson, Intel, and Cakewalk that used each string in a surround speaker diffusion. It was a psychedelic effect, if not necessarily the most practical demo, but proof that a technology like this could have many uses.

For their part, here’s how Antares describes their technology. Notice that they aren’t only talking intonation, but other applications, as well.

Incorporating our world-renowned Auto-Tune pitch detection and manipulation along with our proprietary modeling technologies, ATG-6 is an entirely DSP-based suite of functions that offer everything you’ve always wanted from a guitar, along with capabilities you never imagined possible. From flawless intonation to astonishing tonal flexibility to alternate tunings that open up entirely new areas of inspiration and creativity, ATG-6 technology seriously expands the flexibility and range of the electric guitar while letting you continue to play your own way.

… Using our new Solid-Tune™ Intonation system, an ATG-6 equipped guitar constantly monitors the precise pitch of each individual string and makes any corrections necessary to ensure that every note of every chord and riff is always in tune, regardless of variables like finger position or pressure or physical limitations of the instrument. As a result, listening to a guitar with Solid-Tune is a revelation, offering a purity of intonation that has simply never before been possible.

Of course, Solid-Tune is smart enough to know when you want to manipulate pitch, so you can play bends and vibrato exactly as you always do. In fact, Solid-Tune Intonation makes it even easier to bend to the right pitch every time.

Antares ATG-6

Updated: Chris Randall chides me on Twitter (and I agree) for not mentioning Roland, specifically — that’s the reference above in Jesse’s from-the-hips comments to “hex” guitar. Roland has built a whole business around products that track notes played on a guitar, adding polyphonic pitch shifters, open tunings, note-by-note replacement, MIDI output, and even DSP effects processing. The difference in the Roland offering is that Roland has done all this work in a separate processing box you connect to their pick-up; Antares appears to be promising something that’s all-in-one in the guitar. And the analysis Antares is doing may well prove more sophisticated than what we’ve seen in the past in terms of distinguishing, say, a bend from different notes. That could open up additional and radically-new expressive possibilities, even if the underlying fundamental concept is more or less the same.

On the other hand, the other difference with the Roland offering relative to both Gibson’s past attempts and Antares’ upcoming ones: Roland successfully shipped and sold theirs. Until Antares does the same, advantage: Roland. We’ll be watching.