Bill: A week before the NAMM show I was in LA and Oberheim were kind enough
to give me some office space in the demo room, to let some of the prime guys
in the LA area have a look at the Synthaxe. Allan was one of the guys who 'phoned
me up. He came down, had a look and his reaction was pretty positive - after
a couple of hours' rehearsal, he blew an amazing number. It was great!
What was the response from the people?
Allan: It's hard to tell really. I think they were all asking what on earth
it was.
Bill: Yeah, that's right. There were shouts from the audience saying "What
is it Allan? Tell us what it is." And Allan just turned it on and showed
them. The response we had on the stand the next day was great. We had a lot
of people coming back asking us how the hell did he do this and what tuning
was he using on that bit because, half way through he started pressing buttons
and changing sound textures, registers and complete tuning systems - the whole
issue.
Allan: Yeah it's a marvellous machine. I'd been experimenting with the guitar
tuned in fifths, but with the geometrics of it you can only go dawn so far.
Even starting at 'E' and going down to 'C', like a cello, the guitar's a little
bit small really but, with this, it looks like string length is a thing of the
past. Not only that but you can even get another 'F' below that, which you could
never do on a guitar, it's incredible!
So you were simply preprogramming your usual open tunings.
Allan: Well I normally don't use any tunings other than regular guitar tuning.
I've never really done anything with other tunings, no.
Bill: What! So that was a new thing you were doing; I thought, when I saw you
doing this, that you'd been doing it for years! Amazing!
Allan: Well I was thinking, before I met you and became aware of the SynthAxe,
of starting to experiment with tuning the guitar in fifths like a violin, which
is amazing because, although you've only got four strings, the range is almost
as great as the guitar. Then, when I became more familiar with it, I just stuck
on the string below that, the low 'C'. So it really only happened a few weeks
before I got hold of the SynthAxe, and it's a mind boggling thing to be able
to do it that way, just by pressing a button.
First of all I made myself a double-neck, with one in regular tuning and the
other tuned in fifths, just for practicing. I got hold of a lump of wood, cut
it up and stuck a couple of necks on it.
Bill: That's great. On the stand the next day, people were coming up and asking
what Allan was using and we still had the stuff in the console, so I was able
to dial through and say "Well, this is the sound he was using on the first
one and this is what he was using on that one" and the people were looking
at the tuning systems and just going "wow". But I hadn't realised
that you'd never used it seriously before.
Allan: That's why I was so knocked out with it, because I didn't need two necks
any more. Actually, that was a piece which I've only just done, which I'm hoping
to get on this next record and the whole of the first section is done with the
thing tuned in fifths. It just opens out the range because one of the limitations
of fifths, obviously, is that you can't play real close voicings so you just
have to go the other way, you know, wider. Fifths is a very logical tuning,
but it's quite difficult on guitar because it's so big, but on a violin it's
very' logical, because of the size of the hand and the size of the instrument.
Bill: So, maybe that's a point to the future; if people get into other tunings,
maybe there'll be a case for building a SynthAxe with a shorter scale length.
I mean, we've been as revolutionary as we can be with this thing, but we had
to start from a certain point and we chose a scale length, but what you're saying
might mean that people will want different
scale lengths in the future.
How did you get on with the fretting, as it's almost ungraduated?
Allan: Well, that was the only thing I had any real problem with. I just couldn't
play some of the chords that I normally play on the guitar, because the frets
were just too wide apart at the top of the neck. It's not really a problem,
though, because it will eventually be solved.
Bill: You must let me know, when you've had a bit of time to get into it and
see if you can define what would be the ideal scale length for it.
Allan: Yeah, I will do that.
I've never really understood the reasoning behind using a non-standard Fingerboard
format.
Bill: Well, the logic behind it was that because the positions of the frets
were not musically relevant any more, we were able to look at the conventional
guitar fingerboard and see if there were any areas, as far as playability was
concerned, which could be improved.
This led us to the conclusion that widening the upper fret spaces would allow
the player greater freedom at the top of the neck, especially for playing barre
chords for instance. We were also able to narrow down, slightly, the spacings
at the nut end. The nice thing is that eventually you will be able to define
any neck you want - you could even have ordinary' spaces at the nut end and
wide ones at the tap if that was what you were after.
What about a modular system, where you could clip in, for instance, the top
octave in a totally different scale length?
Bill: Yeah , that would be something. You'd have to decide the size of your
hands, the kind of stuff you wanted to play and then say to the SynthAxe manufacturer
(smiles) "Look, I want it like that".
Of course the tooling cost would be horrendous, because all of that is numerically
controlled - machining the fingerboard, the photographic system on the printed
circuits and you're going to have to pay a premium for something like that,
but it's not out of the question.
Allan: The thing that knocked me out most of all about it was that, when I first
tried the Roland stuff I realised that the pitch to voltage system is absolutely
and totally inadequate. That's not to say that people haven't been able to go
out there and play music, don't get me wrong, because there are lots of guys
doing really amazing things with them. But for me it just seemed to be a crazy
thing to do; to open up this door to doing so much more, and yet to close another
one immediately- like being able to play all the things that you want to be
able to play rhythmically and accurately.
Anything that's pitch to voltage has to sample part of the waveform, so if it's
a long note it's twice the size of a light one. If you play a trill on a high
string it comes out sounding twice as fast as on a low string. Then if you take
a chord and play all the notes at the same time, they don't come out at the
same time and, to me, that is totally unacceptable.
What I noticed immediately about the SynthAxe is that, whatever the problems
are with it, it was obvious that this was the way to go - and I can't wait to
get my hands on it.
I haven't played a SynthAxe For some time now but I remember that the trigger
strings, the right hand strings, had a very light tension.
Bill: That gave Allan a problem. It's been modified since then, and Allan hasn't
seen the improvements yet, but I think it's fair to say that that was the biggest
problem you had wasn't it?
Allan: It was the biggest problem, going to it immediately after a regular guitar,
but I found that if I played it for a couple of hours, it became much easier.
In fact the strangest thing was going back too regular guitar afterwards, that
was really peculiar, because the strings felt so much tighter. But it's just
a different action and you soon get used to it.
Bill: Allan's made a good point there. People who pick up the SynthAxe and expect
to play their Strat and Gibson licks on it are in for a big disappointment.
What Allan's into is doing something new and his perception is amazing, in fact
he's the most perceptive guy, musically, that I've come across in terms of looking
at what an instrument does. So OK, the SynthAxe won't do everything you can
do on a guitar, but it will do a whole pile of things that you'll never do on
a guitar - or a keyboard, I might add - in a month of Sundays, and Allan knows
that and can get into it.
What you've got to do, if you're interested in synthesis, is sit down with the
SynthAxe and give it at least an hour. What you find is this: unlike a lot of
so-called guitar synthesisers, where the more you get into them, the more you
realise their limitations, with the SynthAxe you instantly recognise some of
the limitations, but the more you adapt, the more you realise that there's a
whole world there waiting for you to get into.
I imagine that people make the mistake of treating it too much like a guitar,
instead of saying "This is a SynthAxe, let's get on with it"!
Bill: Absolutely. That is the point, it's not a guitar.
Allan: It's a way of being able to find new ways of expression in music through
the use of a brilliantly designed piece of equipment. Also, I'm totally in awe
of the fact that someone has actually done that. I still find it hard to believe
that someone has gone to all the trouble of putting it together. It's awesome!
Bill: I find it quite unbelievable hearing this! When I saw Allan play it for
the first time on stage I can tell you it was a really strange feeling. I mean,
it was 1977 when I first started thinking that I wanted to do something like
this, and eight years is a very long gestation period. To see somebody actually
doing it- wow! It's an emotion that I've never felt before, and the only thing
I can say is that it's similar to is watching my wife have a baby - that's really
true - I've got three children, one's called Paul, one's called Lindsay and
the other's called SynthAxe! Allan was the midwife!
How near are you to production?
Bill: We're in production now, in a very small way. The ones that we can quote
sensible delivery times on are orders by Gary Moore, Steve Levine, Allan, Lee
Ritenour, John Farrar. The other guys are just having to wait until we can fulfill
their order. In six months time we'll be in serious production.
It has improved immensely since the prototypes and Allan, for instance, is willing
to buy it in it's current state of development, but we've told him there's a
long way to go yet. The people who get the first SynthAxe in the next few months
are automatically going to get any updates or mods we do - mechanical or software.
The other nice thing is, because the product is so software based and because
we're only at the threshold of what the technology can do, we've got nothing
but improvements to offer and that's great.
What's the main difference between your system and any other?
Bill: Basically the only other systems that have been successful commercially
have
been based on the pitch to voltage system. There was an old Hagstrom system
which was a fret triggering design, similar to our left hand triggering mode;
we're not saying that our system is all original - some of it is, while some
ideas have come from other places. The Hagstrom one is an example, only that
was monophonic and it was very difficult to control. If you're comparing our
system to any others, you're talking about pitch to voltage. with that system
you start off by hitting a string and trying to figure out what the string is
doing in acoustic terms; is it vibrating, if so what frequency is it vibrating
at, what level is it vibrating at, when it stops vibrating at a certain level
I will switch that note off. All those things are very unpredictable. I'm not
knocking companies who have designed products using that system, because technically
they're very well designed.
When you start trying to analyse the frequency of a moving guitar string that's
a technological hassle! The trouble is, like Allan says, that depending on the
frequency you get a different sampling time, a difference in performance according
to frequency and problems with
harmonics, so you get spurious pitches sometimes. Then you've got the difficulty
of dynamic control, because when the levels of vibration fall below certain
thresholds, the notes cease to happen, whether you want them to cease or not.
We decided to develop a system which was more predictable, something that a
guitar player can get into and make work, with perhaps some slight adaptation
to his technique; it may not be 100% like a guitar in presentation and technique,
but it is better than something which is presented like a guitar, but only works
50%. We analysed every single parameter like pitch, dynamics, sustain and all
of them are independently under software control. If you bend a guitar string
halfway across the fingerboard it will raise the pitch by a tone or maybe three
semitones. On the SynthAxe you can make it anything you like - it could be an
octave if you like
The same applies to the wang Bar - it can be the range you want it to be; when
you wang it down an octave, all the strings go down exactly on octave, not just
approximately, as on a normal guitar. On the SynthAxe, they all go down absolutely
in parallel, so you get a tuned chord wherever you are on the wang bar! You
don't have to apply these things to pitch either; you could apply them to filter,
attack times, vibrato speeds and depths, whatever you want! All the nice facilities
that are available on the synthesiser you are using are available to you on
the SynthAxe. If you took a pitch to voltage conversion of the guitar signal,
you can only get a limited number of parameters out of that, so you can't take
advantage of a lot of the parameters that are available. It would give you a
very limited view of synthesis.
Allan: That's what was most apparent to me; the pitch to voltage way of controlling
synths, although people have adapted to it very well, is definitely not the
way to go. It's gone as for as it can. The SynthAxe is a totally new instrument
that I can use to control all the other things I want to do - like sampling
for instance.
What about the Synclavier?
Bill: A number of Synclavier users have spoken to us and we're very willing
to do on interface, but that's really down to New England Digital to be willing
to do their half. We'd love to make a Synclavier interface and people like John
Farrar and Al DiMeola have already enquired about it. It doesn't matter how
good our interfaces are, if the synth interface isn't there, there's nothing
we can do.
There's one important point here. If you analyse the MIDI buss coming off the
SynthAxe it is packed solid - we use every available bit in MIDI. and whether
keyboard players like it or not, guitarist's language, in terms of the string
bending, damping and so on, is far more complex than the keyboard player's.
Then again, that's why synths happen to look like piano style keyboards; it's
a very easy way of presenting the man/machine interface. They don't have to
look like a piano. It's really up to the synth manufacturers to come to us and
make sure they can interpret the MIDI information properly.