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Yesterday, I reviewed the Godin xTSA strictly as an electric guitar. Of course, alone, that would miss the point, seeing as it also has a piezo pickup that doubles as an acoustic guitar emulator and a synth pickup. Today, I’ll focus on the acoustic sounds you can get from the instrument.

Here is an mp3 that demonstrates the sounds I get out of the piezo. You might want to leave it open in the background to refer back to.

The first thing to note is that the “acoustic” sound does not really sound much like an acoustic guitar out of the box. It sounds more like a solid body guitar played without amplification and miked, which is a bit like what is actually happening. The pickup itself is part of the bridge, and as I understand it, picks up the vibrations of the each string directly from the string’s contact with the saddle. That signal is then routed through a small preamp with volume and a three band equalizer.

Tone

The EQ is quite responsive, and jacking or cutting the mids in particular completely changes the tone. The result is a jangly sound with mids cut a little and a cutting sound with the mids punched. It still does not sound very acoustic, but it could be useful to adding some definition to an electric sound, particularly on the attack portion.

the convoluted part

I mess with this basic tone to give it a more realistic acoustic flavor. First I run it through Voxengo’s Perfect Space, a convolution reverb plugin I got with Cakewalk’s Sonar. They also sell it separately as a plugin called Pristine Space. Convolution is the process of combining your signal with the sound of some real or imagined acoustic environment. In this case, I mixed the piezo sound of the guitar with the characteristics of an actual acoustic. The sound file that Perfect Space needs to do this is called an impulse response, because it is a recording of the sound of something as close to an impulse as possible, often a balloon popping. In this case, the author of the IR tapped a ceramic spoon against the bridge of his acoustic guitar. I used the “near” version of the acoustic guitar IR from Noise Vault. They have a great selection of acoustic instrument responses, speaker cabinet responses, and various hardware. It is a great resource. If you need a freeby convolution plugin, you might try freeverb3 but it is hard to set up and a resource hog. There used to be one called revolverb, also less than perfect, but that’s gone it seems. If you want to drop a few bucks, Elevayta’s ConvoBoy is good, as is Voxengo’s previously mentioned Pristine Space. Both are reasonable and worth the money. Voxengo is a little less resource hungry, but ConvoBoy lets you load a different IR in each channel of your stereo output, which is kind of neat. Since most of the guitar’s sound comes from the strings, the convolution is kept down in the mix, a flavor rather than the substance. This gives the sound a “woodier” feel, but the resonance gets a little obnoxious if the mids on the eq are turned to high.

Next in the chain is the best fifteen bucks I have spent in a long while, G-Sonique’s FSQ1964 vitalizer/exciter. It grabs the transients…just the part of the signal we are most concerned with in getting a realistic sound — and makes them sound wonderful. After that comes a touch of reverb, then out. I experimented with light chorusing, but ultimately realized whenever I could hear the chorusing it was too much and let it go.

12 string

Not content to have an acoustic, I wanted to see if I could get a twelve string sound out of the piezos. I split the input signal, before all the other effects mentioned above, and ran the unaffected signal in one side and sent the other side first to a very short delay with no feedback to emulate the space between the strings when you pick a twelve string, and to articulate the higher note just a little clearer. Then the delayed signal goes to a pitch shifter set to raise the pitch one octave. The delayed, raised note then gets fed back in with the slightly earlier unmodified note before coming out the convolution “body.” It is not exactly accurate, as the high E and B strings on a real twelve string are not an octave higher like the lower four strings are, but it still sounds neat. As the sound file makes clear, it is not perfect. It warbles a little as an artifact of the pitch-shifting effect, but when it is mixed back a little and accompanied by other instruments, it passes reasonably well. Take a listen to Be Miner for an example. The rhythm part is all on the “12-string.”

Conclusion of acoustic part

Obviously, I like the processed sound a lot and have spent some time to get it as good as I can. If I really need acoustics on a recording, I’ll go with fresh strings and an XY arrangement of a matched pair of mics on a real acoustic, like in Bomb the Beach. But having an acoustic-sounding guitar that you can mix in with your electric and synthesized sounds as you are playing is a blast. A couple of things I like to do are to chop the attack off a distorted electric guitar and replace it with the acoustic attack, or have one delayed a beat or portion of a beat behind the other. It is also really nice to be able to put an analog, human touch sound into a synthesized one, opening up lots of new textures and spaces, which is what I am all about musically.

Well that is it on the acoustic portion of the xSTA. Two down, with the synth section yet to go. Even without the synth, this is a blast of a guitar.

Finally, If you didn’t get a chance the other day, give a listen to the four new tracks from rreplay and let me know what you think!

If you are interested in digital guitar, check out the Digital Guitarist YouTube Channel. Subscribe here.

 

For the past year and a half, while I have been travelling a lot, I’ve been playing a new guitar (to me anyway), a Godin xTSA. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while, but have been too busy playing with it after aninitial response to it a year ago. I am just going to write about the electric guitar part of it today, keeping in mind it has an “acoustic” piezo pickup and a guitar synth controller built in (update: here’s the acoustic part and the synth part). I’ll write about each of those separately when I get a chance. In a way, the procrastination has been helpful, as I have had plenty of time to get to know the quirks and features — and there are a lot of both — of this excellent, reasonably priced guitar synth.

The Guitar

I had my eyes on Godin guitars for a while before playing one. They are quite nice in general and I like their philosophy of mass producing but hand finishing, and for the most part this allows them to make the best “bang for your buck” guitar on the market today, both their electrics and their acoustic counterparts, Seagull guitars, as well as a somewhat dizzying array of other brands they make.

The first thing to notice about the guitar is that the finish isgorgeous. I am partial to dark red guitars, and wanted the brandy sunburst one for a change but got a better deal on this black one because it had been used for demoing. I actually love the finish. It is a sort of dark brown on black tiger stripe sunburst that draws out the grain of the wood. The image does not really do it justice but I’m too busy to take new pics. OK, so it looks nice, but what does it do?

neck

I’ll go over the feel and playability first. It was pretty much set up right at the factory. The neck is wide enough for my fairly large hands, and it plays well. One problem is that the longways alignment seems ever so slightly off, so that I need to be careful when bending or using vibrato on the high E string or the string will go off the neck at my left hand finger, resulting in a dead note. Hopefully I can find a good luthier to fix this once I get back to Hawaii and have another guitar to play. As such, it is one of several minor flaws with an otherwise beautiful guitar. The neck is a bolt on, which I am not usually a fan of, because the double thickness of the wood gets in the way when playing the upper frets, and the xTSA is no exception. My old SG with the fitted neck and double cutaways plays above the 12th fret much better, but a bolt-on neck is one of the ways Godin is able to keep the cost down and still make a good solid guitar. It is held in much more firmly than say a fender bolt on, and considering that it is a single cutaway guitar, it still plays well up top. The reason for the playability is that it is not a Les Paul style guitar. I’ve never been a fan of LPs because of the weight. I realize that and a set of humbuckers is what gives them their particular sound, but I’m generally not fond of the sound either. The non-cutaway side of the xTSA is more streamlined and to my eye cooler looking than the round LP shape. The body is tapered in the back but flat on the front, so it feels comfortable to play while sitting or standing. It also weighs about half of a LP, falling in the range of a strat or SG as far as heft.

tuningidiosyncrasies

The strings attach to the one piece bridge/tailpiece through the body like on a hardtail strat, giving the guitar excellent sustain. The whammy bar is responsive and the tuning system keeps things reasonably well in tune for all but the most dive bomby whammies. At the other end, it has locking tuners. A word in the manual would have been nice, but once the thing is tuned, it stays in really well, at least in part because of the tuning locks. The tuners are branded as Godin, and are geared smoothly and encased somewhat like Grover tuners. So far so good, but tuning has a couple of problems.

First, if you are an aggressive right hand player, or lazy and don’t change the strings often, forget finishing a song if you break one at a gig. For some reason the string tensions in the bridge/tailpiece/whammy bar setup are all interdependent, so if one string breaks, everything goes out of tune by at least a half step, and because each string has its own tension, they all go out of tune differently. This same problem makes tuning a pain in general. I found the best system is to start with the low E, then tune the A, then go back and readjust the E, which will have gone flat from the tightening (or sharp from loosening) of the A, then the D, after which you need to return the E and A, and so on. It gets progressively less out of tune as you proceed toward the lighter strings because they exert less pressure and so changing them does not throw things out of whack as much. If you start on the lighter strings or tune them all before returning to the lower strings, you are in for a frustrating session of infinite tune up.

A second thing to watch for as far as tuning is that if you are a player who likes to rest your right palm behind the bridge to do mutes easily, you have to be hyperaware of the weight you put there, as it will raise the tuning with the slightest pressure. It is an easy and intuitive adjustment, but it is disconcerting to play one note and hear another come out, especially after going through all the tuning trouble.These are sorely poorly thought out design flaws, but you can adapt your playing to them to compensate, and that is in fact a worthwhile sacrifice, as in many other respects the xTSA is a blast to play. On the plus side, once you are in tune, the guitar stays in tune really well, and breaking a reasonably new string is pretty much of a rarity. Just make sure you have a fresh set on for gigs. The locking tuners seem to make new strings stay in tune better, so I don’t have to go through stretching them and playing for a day or two to break them in before they stay in tune well — they stay in tune as soon as you put them on, though I still give a new set a little stretch after tuning them the first time to get them settled in.

pickups

I am a big fan of the p90 gibson single coil sound. I generally don’t care for the “creaminess” of humbuckers, and feel that they lose a lot of the expressive potential that a good player can put into the tone with the right hand. I like the bite of hot single coils. Turning the volume back on the guitar a little usually yields the nice strat like “spanky” tones so good for rhythm guitar and bluesy stuff, and forget getting a good jangly sound out of a humbucker. I get something visceral (cheat: this is my p90 SG, not the xTSA)out of single coils tonewise that I just gets lost on humbuckers. Nonetheless, all my other electrics are single coils so I figured I’d try something new.

The xTSA has three Godin pickups made specifically for this guitar. They are probably outsourced from another manufacturer, but I like them fine once I got them set up. The neck and bridge positions are humbuckers, with a single coil in the middle. The controls are simple: One volume knob, one tone knob, and a five position strat-style switch that chooses neck only, neck + middle, middle only, middle+bridge, and bridge only. The neck humbucker is nice for super-saturated low-treble stuff (like at the 2:35 mark of this one). I seldom use the bridge humbucker by itself…it seems all bark and no bite to me, but that’s just how trebly humbuckers sound.

The real genius of this guitar is in the middle three settings, but only with some serious tweaking. The middle pickup is the single coil. From the factory, it was set too low for my taste. No matter the volume setting, it would not crank. Just clean, bright, strat-like tone, a little on the trebly side. I tried adjusting it upward, but the holes were drilled too deep, and the closest it got to the strings was still too far away to get any of the rougher single coil sounds. I took the pickup out and stuffed the wooden ends of two kitchen matches into each of the two screw holes and then screwed the pickup back in. This was just the ticket to raise the pickup enough and I got my single coil crank when the volume was up and the slinky sound when it was pulled back a bit. Whoever put the pickup in just drilled too deep, either by design or mistake. It is a bit harsher sounding than my SG and jaguar single coils, but it really comes into its own in the second and fourth positions, when combined with the humbuckers. That takes the harsh out, but still flavors the tone with the single coil bite. Listen to the “spanky” link above, or just about anything else I record where the electric guitar sound is featured. I love the sound of these two settings and use them a lot.

I’ve been pretty critical here. I’ve been playing a long time, and I’ve had a year to get to know the Godin. My other two main electric guitars are a late seventies SG with single coils and a pre-CBS Jaguar. I am traveling this past year and a half and have only carried the Godin with me. I really like the old guitars for different things, and occasionally miss them, but for the most part, the xTSA has been a blast. Once I figured out the problems (and there are still one or two more to cover when I talk about the acoustic and the synth portions), it has proven a quirky but excellent instrument, kind of like the Jaguar, but a hundred times more versatile. I’ll talk about the acoustic features and the synth part separately, but I want to emphasize that what I love about this guitar is the ability to mix all three to get an amazingly broad tonalpalette: synths with acoustic overtones and electric guitar grit, all mixable and switchable from the guitar, pretty much any sound I can imagine and more than a few I discovered rather than imagined. Not all of them are spacey either. Check out the “organ” in the “spanky” piece mentioned earlier. It is all played on the guitar. So to sum up, in spite of the flaws, this is a guitar that can hold its own in comparison to SGs and Fenders just as an electric. It has some flaws, but they are more than made up for by the tonalpalettethat the electric is only one component of.

On a final note, one of my justifications for getting another guitar was the travel, and I did not want to subject the oldsters toairplane baggage handling. I got an industrial, TSA- and baggage handler-proof SKB ATA Roto Electric Bass case (see first pic, above). You put your guitar in its own gig bag, then put the whole into the SKB. It is pretty indestructible. The outside is getting pretty battered, and it lost its wheels, which I am hoping SKB is going to replace, but the guitar comes through in pristine condition.

I’ll cover the acoustic part of the xTSA next. Meanwhile, don’t neglect these new tunes from rreplay, all played on the xTSA, if you want to get a feel for what it –and Eric and I — can do. And thanks again to Eric (the “ep” of rreplay) and Karen for putting me up while in Boston, and I hope moving is not stressing you out too much!

Just spent a few weeks at Eric and Karen’s in Somerville recording new stuff and remixing some older ones. Here are four new songs then. the link will take you to a new page which will play in the background. FB people may have to visit way music (http://waymusic.way.net) to get it to play. never can tell!

Here are two more tracks from a jam with Chris Dixon of Slimpocket (rapping), Alison Hearn (keyboards), Jake (rapping and sax – sorry never got his last name), Eric Parker (bass) and me (laptop guitar and beats). The first one has a cool two bass thing happening. The second is “Catch me on the Streets.” These and the ones from the other day are all recorded on a pocket digital recorder stuck over by the PA. Not too bad for low rent recording tech. FB people might need to come to http://waymusic.way.net to hear.

I promised FB friends a link to the music I’ve been doing lately…bassist Eric Parker and I (i.e. rreplay) jammed 3 different times with rapper Chris Dixon (check him out at slimpocket.com) and keyboard player Alison Hearn. Here is a cut from that session. The second time I forgot my laptop AC chord and so just played straight through an amp in the room with no fx for a change after the battery ran out. One cut came out a little like a digital underground throwback with some conscious rapping [edit: maybe a little by way of NYC No Wavers the Contortions :)] Chris was unfortunately drowned out this session (maybe because we had live drums), but here the link gives a sense of the music and a little bit of rapping. That session we were joined by Jake, a sax player/rapper/beatmaker guy and drummer Justin. Did not catch their last names. Jake came back for an encore the third night and we got a few more good tracks. I’ll go through them and post an excerpt. rreplay is also recording some more, and hopefully we’ll finally get to mix our second album while I’m here in Boston. As usual, FB people may have to come to the blog at http://waymusic.way.net to hear stuff…never sure how that is going to work.

I have been working a little with a soundscape construction program called tapestrea from the sound lab people at Princeton. The result is a couple of second snippet of a birdcall I recorded in Manoa raised, lowered, warped, multiplied, shrunk, and stretched. The first few seconds are the complete unadulterated sample from which the rest of the piece is constructed. Try it with headphones, as the stereo placement of the tweets is pretty cool. As usual, if you are picking this up on Facebook, you may need to come to http://waymusic.way.net for the links to work and to hear the music. Hah! and I bet you thought I was going to announce I’m on twitter or some such. I haven’t seen a good reason to become a twit yet though.

I played at Mercury Bar the other night for a 20 minute or so set. Thanks to everyone who came down to hear the great poetry, improv, and me. I wanted to keep things that could go wrong to a minimum, so I did not try to record, but today for kicks I did record the same thing, more or less, as what I played at Mercury and two other songs. Here they are. Just load it in the background while you do something else.

Facebook people will need to go to http://way.net/music/audio/mercury%20set.html or else come to the blog at http://waymusic.way.net in order to hear.

Here is the missing flyer for Wednesday’s MIA night at Mercury. Starts at 7:30. Hope you can make it! The music in the link is from when I was in Philly. M said it sounded funereal.

I’ll be playing at MIA at Mercury Bar for a short set along with a great bunch of pets and other types like that the Weds. after next, starting time 8 PM. Guaranteed to entertain and amuse. In honor of my extreme case of overwhelment and disorganization, I’ll post a new song every time I figure out a new detail as far as the date and event and participants. This one is kind of fun…if you set it on repeat, it seamlessly starts over again where it ended. It is called circ’later.