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.

Smule, the iPhone/iPod touch development house that has released an Ocarina and a Leaf Trombone to the iPhone, has now partnered with T-Pain and Auto-Tune to bring a T-Pain-branded app to the mobile platform. I interviewed Ge Wang earlier; he gets exceptional music geek cred for the creation of the real-time synthesis language ChucK.

But this app goes further. It isn’t just called Auto-Tune for iPhone, or T-Pain Presents Auto-Tune by Smule or something like that. It actually promises to turn you into T-Pain, sort of like the toys that make you sound like Darth Vader. And that means it has exactly one application – one essential application, I’d say. It means you can do amazing covers of “I’m on a Boat.”

Something has jumped a shark here, but I’m not sure which. Maybe it jumped over the shark onto the boat.

Two more serious observations:

One, this theoretically could be a useful addition to your mobile arsenal. Mike Una uses Auto-Tune to map the continuously-varying pitch of his “Beep-It” optical Theremin to a scale. Of course, the problem is that the iPhone lacks an audio input jack, though maybe someone has an idea for how to solve that.

Two, a question: just when, exactly, will we get basic audio DSP coding on a platform that’s not the iPhone? Sony’s PSP is arguably more powerful, but requires you to take your game system into a back alley to modify it to run homebrewed software. Google’s Android has more powerful hardware in the pipeline, at least, but there’s still not really official support for running native audio code (even though that’s how the phone’s own audio system was built). People are starting to simply say “iPhone app” when what they mean is “mobile app,” and that’s a shame.

The Internet, having satisfied itself yesterday with video that faked a Beyonce who couldn’t sing, now imagines news that can. And Steve Reich is proven ahead of his time — again. (Congrats on the Pullitzer – it took them just five decades to notice!)

Yes, Antares’ Auto-Tune plug-in – now so ubiquitous in mainstream, non-audio-engineer knowledge that it’s become a generic description like “Kleenex” – can be applied to everything. (We, um, can only hope these industrious YouTubers are using legally-licensed copies – that is, until Antares releases a 99-cent iPhone app.) And so, hilariously, we imagine a world of news sung hip-hop style.

As it happens, this digital foolery does reveal something deeper. One of the joys of language in general, certainly true of English, is the degree to which musical-like inflection turns our spoken words into songs. In English, these inflections are more decorative than syntactical – good news, as unlike a language like Mandarin, the wrong inflection won’t get you in trouble. But I think a lot of the texture of the music of English-speakers – native and non-native alike – is influenced by the rhythms and melodic contours of our speech. Would Jazz have happened in a country without American English and its regional dialects? Given the sounds of “talking” trumpet mutes, my guess is it would have sounded quite different.

Poor video, but gives you the idea (where’s the official Steve Reich YouTube channel?):

The Auto-Tune News is intentionally silly, of course. But even without digital aids, people have been finding songs in recorded speech. Take composer Steve Reich: without the aid of Auto-Tune, he found surprisingly in-tune sounding melodic fragments in interview recordings for pieces like Different Trains, and later built an entire opera around the technique. (The Cave, with its accompanying video, below.)

Antares, for their part, is keeping a good sense of humor about all of this – and laughing all the way to the bank. There news stream has followed the pop culture references to their product, and even jokingly suggested they would introduce Direct Mind Access Composition Technology on April Fool’s Day. (Don’t laugh too much: I heard composer Jon Appleton, sitting alongside fellow luminaries Bob Moog, Laurie Spiegel, Morton Subotnik, and others, suggest a musical brain hat at a panel on the future of music. I’m happy to actually shut down my mind occasionally, so I don’t entirely understand the appeal.)

Previously:

AutoTune: The Song, a $99 Version (Hide!), and Some History

And here’s part I of Auto-Tuning the news. Daily Show, eat your heart out:

Thanks to decrepitude in comments. (Erm – that being the dude/dudette’s alias, not actual decrepitude in comments. That we’re not thankful for.)