I really was astonished I guess I assumed that guitarists were such outliers to the world of software synthesizers that nobody was working on a software based guitar to MIDI interface. When casually watching a video at England’s Sound on Sound on the magazine’s 30th anniversary late one night, I nearly fell out of my chair, when about 19 minutes in, Paul White, the magazine’s editor, who is also a guitarist, said he was experimenting with a VST-plugin MIDI guitar interface. But in order to add keyboards, pads and exotic instruments to my guitar-oriented productions, I soldiered on with the GI-20 ever since purchasing a unit shortly after its release to write reviews for the early days of Blogcritics and the consumer electronics magazine Nuts & Volts. Personally, as someone who is a far better guitarist than keyboardist, I loved the ability to play my software synthesizers via guitar, despite having to spend plenty of time afterwards editing a part of glitches and ghost notes – it’s quite a challenge for any device to translate the idiosyncratic playing techniques of guitar with its slides, finger squeaks and bent notes to a format that’s compatible with keyboard-oriented synthesizers. However, the tracking on the GI-20 was far from perfect, leading to many frustrated guitarists. In 2003, Roland introduced the GI-20 interface, which allowed a guitar with a compatible hex pickup to connect his guitar to a computer’s USB port. However, controlling these synthesizers via guitar was a challenge. And they could be seamlessly integrated with digital audio workstation (DAW) recording programs. Because these units were largely modeling guitar-oriented sounds, they track extremely well and are surprisingly user friendly I still use my VG-88 and VG-99 to this day.īut starting in the late 1990s, as computers became more and more powerful, software-based synthesizers became more and more popular instead of banks and banks of physical synthesizers overwhelming a music room, a single computer could contain within it programs such as Reason, and the software versions of Korg’s popular M1 and Wavestation, the Fairlight, the Synclavier, and other classic and cutting edge synthesizer sounds. Perhaps due to the tracking issues, in the following decade, Roland seemed to move somewhat away from the guitar synthesizer model, instead creating their virtual guitar system, which also used their proprietary hexaphonic pickup, releasing the VG-8 in 1995, the VG-88 in 2000, and the VG-99 in 2007. In the mid-1980s, Roland released a rack-mounted MIDI converter for their early multipin-equipped guitars called the GM-70. Finally, a keyboard produced Yamaha could control a sound module or drum machine produced by Roland, since they now shared a mutual language.
But while the guitar synthesizer was first taking off, Roland, along with Oberheim Electronics, Sequential Circuits, Korg, Yamaha, and Kwaii introduced the concept of MIDI, short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, in 1983 to allow synthesizers, drum machines, and other forms of music technology to talk with each other. The GR-300 was an interesting beast with its own distinct fuzzy analog synth sound it tracked remarkably well, but these early guitar synthesizers were all self-contained they couldn’t control other sound modules or keyboards.
Roland would later refine and simplify this approach into the GR-300, used in the early ’80s by such notable electric guitarists as Andy Summers of the Police, Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew of King Crimson, Jimmy Page, and Pat Matheny. The Roland GR-500 in turn was plugged into a module that resembled Data’s control station on the bridge of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The guitar also featured the first iteration of Roland’s breakthrough hexophonic pickup, which unlike the mono electric guitar pickups of the 1950s designed by men such as Leo Fender and Gibson’s Seth Lover, fed the output from each string to separate outputs of a multipin-equipped cable, allowing for polyphonic synthesizer control. While the body of the GR-500 was shaped much like Gibson’s best-selling Les Paul electric guitar, the GR-500 was a far more complex beast, with seven dials on the guitar for various sounds, along with eight toggle switches. In 1977, the Roland corporation of Japan, which has long been at the forefront of integrating music and technology introduced the GR-500, first commercially available guitar synthesizer. (Skip down to the next subhead if all of this is old hat to you.) A Quick Overview of the Frustrating Last Four Decades Of Guitar Synthesizers