By Tom Mulhern
Guitar synthesizers haven’t enjoyed the warm embrace from players that has been received by such technologies as whammy bars, dual-preamp amps, or just about anything else. By comparison, Rodney Dangerfield has gotten heaps of respect. But it isn’t for lack of trying to win acceptance that the guitar synth has fallen short of guitarists’ expectations. Ever since the first keyboard-equipped synthesizers hit the mainstream market around 1970, a lot of guitarists (and a lot of manufacturers) have been lured into thinking, "If a keyboardist can have these sounds, why can’t a guitar?" As a result, countless millions of dollars have been devoted to putting synth sounds under the control of a pick-wielder, fortunes have been won and lost (mostly lost), and the fight still isn’t over.
To say that guitar synthesis is the revolution that failed is, in many ways, inaccurate. In point of fact, there have been four revolutions; we’re currently in the fourth. And unlike series of political upheavals, where there may be small insurrections followed by increasingly bigger insurrections followed by full-scale revolt, the history of guitar synths has mostly gone the opposite way. From the 1970s through the 1980s, dozens of companies have come and gone, all trying their own approach to guitar synthesis.
Few companies last very long in this part of the music business, with Roland the most notable exception. But is anyone to blame? Is guitar synthesis something that just can’t work? Is there too much prejudice built up in guitarists because so much of the early controllers just couldn’t cut it? Or, was the concept simply oversold? Consider how few successful synth controllers for drummers, wind players, or violinists have come along–should guitarists be expected to have greater inclination toward using synths? A look at the history of effects and synth controllers provides an insight that would say, "Yes." However, history can be a tricky thing. . . .
Fuzz, wah, phasing, and echo had arrived, and thanks to forward-looking companies such as Gibson’s Maestro division, a great number of single and combination effects were beginning to flood the marketplace. Some were junk, but others were amazing: The Maestro Phaser took the world by storm, and so did Musitronics’ Mu-Tron III auto-wah. Just about every type of fuzz was introduced, and as a crossover from the still-new synth technology came filters. Individually, these effects sounded pretty spicy for their time, but guitarists heard what could come out of keyboard synths and wanted that kind of complexity and newness.
Slowly but surely, early guitar "synths" appeared, mostly boxes that simply combined effects. The EMS Synthi Hi-Fli from England was one of the coolest. Developed in conjunction with David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, it included a ring modulator (which gave notes a bell-like out-of-tuneness), distortion, various waveforms, and filtering. Maestro’s USS-1 Universal Synthesizer delivered similar effects, as did the Syntar, the Condor, Ludwig’s synthesizer, and Frogg’s Spectra-Sound. Guitarists were mostly unimpressed, partly because they were so limited (compared to keyboard synths), and partly because they cost several hundred dollars and up. A major component in guitarists turning thumbing their noses at these boxes was their own unrealistic expectations. The guitar is a pretty complex instrument (in terms of the sound it produces), whereas the keyboard synth was, at that time, a series of on/off switches that activated oscillators, filters, and envelope generators to produce sounds. To shoehorn the dynamics, the bending, the almost endless number of nuances of guitar technique into a form that could be squeezed through a synth and sound good was almost an impossibility. In fact, to this day, the task is still somewhat daunting for engineers.
The next revolution came when the synth was put under actual control by the pitches played on the guitar, rather than simply processing the sound. A process known as PVC, or pitch-to-voltage conversion, turned an in-coming note into a square wave (using fuzz) and then analyzed how many square waves per second there were. From there the number of square waves was converted into a voltage that controlled oscillators. The in-coming attack of the guitar was used to trigger envelope generators that controlled the opening and closing of voltage-controlled filters (VCFs) and voltage-controlled amplifiers (VCAs). "This is it!" everyone seemed to say about the guitar synthesizers introduced in this era. And, why not? Heavyweights of keyboard synthdom–ARP and Roland–were leading the charge, with the formidable 360 Systems and even Ampeg jumping in with both feet. In early 1978, ARP (the biggest name in synths, next to Moog) introduced its Avatar in a biblical-epic-style ad that said: "Stolen from the gods of the keyboard. Bestowed on the disciples of the guitar." Hoo boy! You could use the Avatar with any guitar–its pickup mounted much like Roland’s modern pickups–and get hexaphonic (six notes simultaneously) fuzz out of it, and play one synthesized note at a time. For $3,000, it was considered a very expensive fuzz box. In its two years of existence, less than 1,000 were sold. ARP put huge amounts of R&D into the Avatar and a never-produced polyphonic successor, the Centaur (which would have retailed between $15,000 and $20,000), and eventually went bankrupt.
Roland’s GS-500 required Roland’s guitar and also provided monophonic synthesis with hexaphonic fuzz. And like the Avatar, it was a few thousand bucks. While it didn’t flop, it didn’t catch the world on fire. But on the other hand, Roland wasn’t goofy enough to put all of its R&D eggs in the guitar synth basket. The company was at the threshold of becoming a mega-force in effects pedals and keyboard synths. They also learned from the experience, a common Roland theme that reverberates throughout their 20-year quest for the ultimate guitar synthesizer. Unlike their competitors who either got out of guitar synthesizers or went belly-up, Roland kept plodding ahead.
Other major players of the period were 360 Systems, which had an expensive but functional polyphonic guitar synthesizer system, as well as a monophonic one. In a few years, 360 Systems was out of the guitar synth business, although other synth-related gear continued to be made. Another experiment that dead-ended was Walter Sear’s massive guitar synth prototype that utilized Moog modular synthesizer gear. Its consultants included Steve Howe and John McLaughlin, but it never got out of the lab.
By the end of the decade, poor guitar synth sales put a bad taste in the mouths of most manufacturers, who mostly wanted to pursue other avenues (namely ones that would make money). Raging inflation and increasing interest rates forced more conservative R&D decisions, and the guitar synth’s development slowed considerably.
A few synths cropped up between 1979 and 1980, including Musiconics’ MCI B-35-S (sort of a Guitorgan with filters), HEAR’s Zetaphon Mark II (from the company that eventually became known as Zeta Systems, with killer hexaphonic fuzz and filtering, costing $4,500 in 1980), and Korg, whose $550 X-911 required no special pickup. Just plug in your guitar, do a good job of playing clean, and the sound will come out sounding like a fuzz box through a filter. In fact, other companies also had equally unimpressive units that worked similarly: Electro-Harmonix, Resynator, and A&F Systems come to mind. Don’t think these were cheesy and bad-sounding. On the contrary, they were great effects devices. For instance, the X-911 had portamento, which let you glide from note to note, as well as octave division and doubling. Not only that, but there were preset tones designed to emulate tuba, trumpet, violin, and flute. None of them sounded exactly like the instruments, but they did have their own charm.
Oncor Sound of Salt Lake City didn’t try changing pitches to voltage. Instead, they opted to follow a more keyboard-like approach: 96 fret switches determined which note would play when you struck one of the six "strum bars" that were laid out like strings. The synthesizer circuitry was built into the instrument, which let you mute, bend, hammer on, and infinitely sustain notes. In theory, it was wonderful, but in practice it meant that you didn’t get any real guitar sound since there were no strings or pickups. This was eventually one of the kisses of death for Oncor, and it was a problem that would eventually plague SynthAxe, Stepp, and Yamaha.
If you’re too young to remember the deep (really, really deep) recession from 1980 through about 1983, here’s all you need to know: The music industry was like Europe during the Black Death. If your company wasn’t dead or dying, you were just waiting for its end to come. The general economy was in the toilet, but record companies and musical-equipment manufacturers dropped like flies. R&D money for guitar synthesis? There wasn’t much. But by mid-decade there were dozens of guitar synth system, led, as usual by Roland, who had the trapezoidal G-707 guitar and matching G-77 bass as their central players. To expand Roland’s user base, the company sold retrofit pickup/controller systems for other manufacturers to put into their guitars. Ibanez introduced its IMC1 controller, which converted pitch to MIDI for controlling MIDIable synths and samplers. You could use Ibanez’ guitar–with its digital whammy bar–or any Roland guitar. Shadow, Kaman, and Charvel marketed the GTM-6, another rack MIDI controller that let you use your own guitar, and IVL, DigiTech, and Kramer marketed their rackable Pitchrider. Zeta’s GC660 for guitar and GC440 for bass, K-Muse’s Photon (eventually part of Gibson), and Passac systems joined the fray.
The high-priced spread came from Synclavier, who sold systems to the likes of John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola, and Pat Metheney (prices ranged from $85,000 to $500,000, depending on options). Farther down the price ladder, but still costing a bundle (around $20,000) was the SynthAxe, which Allan Holdsworth and Lee Ritenour championed. It used separate sets of strings for the neck and picking areas, plus it had six piano-type keys for triggering notes, and a palm trigger. It sensed fretting position and didn’t rely on sensing pitches. One of its coolest features was that you could save alternative tunings in memory, and set up a "virtual capo" location on each string.
By the end of the decade, these systems also started to thin out, even as Roland launched its first rack controller/synth box, the GM-70, and Korg rolled out its short-lived controller (virtually identical to Roland’s). Yamaha unveiled its G10, a plastic-bodied controller (and its rack module) that used sonar to sense where a string was fretted, in addition to wired frets and accelerometers in the strings. It didn’t produce any sound–the strings were merely for control purposes and didn’t even need accurate tuning. At about the same time, Beetle’s Quantar utilized similar technology. A court battle ensued, the Beetle vanished, and within a little more than a year, Yamaha killed its controller. An English company introduced the rectangle-bodied Stepp DG-1, a SynthAxe-like controller that promised a less pricey way to do all that a SynthAxe could do. It quickly disappeared. Casio’s MG-510, introduced in 1988 (the same year as the Yamaha G10) was a Strat-style guitar controller that had direct MIDI output–no rack box needed. It was an okay guitar, too, but few were snapped up. Casio also tried the DG-20, a $500 guitar-like object with built-in synth and drum machine, MIDI out, and loosely tensioned strings that were pressed against the frets to locate notes. Even Suzuki tried a couple of low-cost controllers. All are now gathering dust in pawnshops or basements, and on the junkyard of history.
Great strides in pitch-to-MIDI conversion and translating guitaristic nuances had been made, and players such as Andy Summers, Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Steve Morse, and Carlos Alomar used their synths to record some tantalizing music. But as the decade closed, it seemed that the guitar synth controller was being permanently moved to a back burner.
Was there a black hole waiting to gobble up every guitar synth controller that came along? Was it impossible to gain, and keep, a foothold in the marketplace? Why didn’t guitar synthesis stick? Well, it actually has stuck. It’s just not the big market that the manufacturers hoped for. It’s more like a niche market. Educators have found the guitar synth controller a powerful teaching tool, and players have discovered its potential for laying down keyboard- and horn-style tracks. As a compositional tool, it’s hard to beat, and since the problem of delay time in the tracking has been largely solved (except for the swiftest of speed demons), there’s little to keep guitarists away from the technology. Except, perhaps, the guitar synth’s history, and to a certain extent, its price. Considering how much a keyboardist will spend for the average MIDI keyboard, though, a guitar synth controller isn’t terribly expensive.
Finally, two more important considerations that may propel this fourth guitar synth revolution: Acoustic guitars can utilize the technology, and you can now use any electric guitar (meaning your own guitar) with virtually all systems. Although it’s unlikely that we’ll see the hoopla or hype that accompanied guitar synths of yesteryear, it is likely that you’ll see a sustained interest in guitar synthesis and an actual acceptance of the instrument.