Synth pedal for guitar

Oh, man. Something else to spend money on. Resistance is futile: EHX Synth9.

P.S. I didn't mean to make this a commercial post. Anytime guitars and synthesizers intersect I get excited, and put this out there for others who share that excitement. One of these days I plan to start a guitar synthesizer blog. Anyway, with this and other products nowadays that use digital signal processing there is a diminishing need for a special pickup, and that is terribly empowering to me. One thing about this product is that it basically models a synthesizer without giving you much to program other than a couple parameters (price reflected). Does a loss of hands-on programming ability bother anyone out there? Or is it just eating candy, who cares?

Edited by HackettFan - February 23 2017 at 08:30

Oh, I so agree about midi or other pitch conversion approaches to guitar synthesis, and if nothing else it's just a hassle getting it set up. I have a Roland GR-20 and a Roland GR-30 and I've played a GR-55 at a local music store. I found the latency detectable, but not troubling. However, I found in fast runs they would skip some notes altogether. If one finds one absolutely must play piano on guitar, then a Roland is recommended, but otherwise, I don't care to mess with them. I have never tried midi pickups. I know there are people who rave about the Fishman Triple Play, but I have not tried it, and am no longer interested in anything that requires a special pickup (except for the Vo Guitar, a very different animal, I want one of those).

I'm not certain from your post if you're aware that the Synth9 is actually not midi. It just applies some extraordinary digital algorithms to the straight guitar signal. It's not the first to do this. The POG2 and especially the HOG2 did it with polyphonic octave generation and used those octaves as harmonics for additive synthesis. Only the straight guitar signal was used. Then, last year Boss came out with the SY300, which also bypasses the need for pitch to voltage or pitch to midi conversion by digitally processing the existing guitar signal. However it does it, the SY300 models three oscillators with choices of different wave forms and a whole bunch of ways of tweaking them. The HOG2 and SY300 are fully polyphonic and zero latency. The Synth9 promises to also be polyphonic with zero latency. It has fewer parameters to control unfortunately, although it's accordingly cheaper too. It would be interesting to see any of these three would work with wind instruments. Would they just process the signal as they do with the guitar, or are the algorithms specifically optimized for guitar? I don't know.