Do my songs require realistic guitar sounds?

if you don't have a guitar, don't try to make it sound like one. It will just sound like an failed attempt....
Use some VSTs, and MIDI your way through.

The real thing of course, but I often forget that we live in the I-Pod generation which was promoted with the aid of 'Star Trek'. I'm sure you all remember '7 of Nine'. "You will be assimilated, resistance is futile". It's called predictive programming and you all wonder why they paint school buses yellow and black. It's beecause we all need a little training beefore we enter the beehive, so beehave. Bee a good bee.

if you don't have any instruments, I don't see how you can use a real guitar...

Edited by paganinio - July 14 2009 at 21:18

It all really depends on the best way to get the sound you really want.  If you can't decide between two sounds, use them both.    You can mix them together or alternate them. 

I think the best thing to do is, when this poll is over, to tell us that our opinions suck and we can all go screw ourselves and that you're just going to write whatever you want regardless.


I just watched a documentary about Miles Davis and his courageous transition into his electric sound, so, I hope that helps explain my current mood.


Edited by explodingjosh - July 14 2009 at 17:23

Yea this decision seems a little asinine. Will the 'guitar' in the music even have any emotional purpose? And if so, then choose what YOU think expresses what you want. Don't expect anyone else to enjoy it the way you do.

As we choose between 'fantasy' and 'real-sounding' in this poll, we're going through the large catalog of guitar sounds in our heads that best matches those descriptions. For me to tell you to play 'realistic' guitar is absolutely pointless unless you can hear and feel exactly what I am imagining. And even if you could hear and feel what I was thinking of, and you used it, it then wouldn't be that original.

Now to talk about great examples of what I think is 'fantasy' and 'real' guitar.......... when I think of 'fantasy' guitar, I think of Allan Holdsworth, Pat Metheny, John McLaughlin, John Scofield and their use of synthesized guitar. Or Chris 'Arpmandude' and his out-of-this-world use of harmonics and the whammy bar. Or Fredrik Thordendal's 'unrealistic' sounds. When I think of 'real' guitar, I think of Steve Howe, Steve Hackett on the acoustic side and players like Carlos Santana, Walter Becker with their clean and bright sound on the electric side. But none of this at all has anything to do with what you're trying to express through your own music.

Vompatti wrote: Why does it have to sound like a guitar at all?

Well, it has to be reallistic guitar sound, it sounds WAY better, and so for the feelings and all

You can get some great, high-quality soundfonts for midi files if you want that sound great. That being said, in my mind this is really only good for keyboards (where it is excellent - I have a patch of Mellotron midis on my computer that sound like the real thing), as they are generally sample-based instruments anyway. I'm not a fan of it on guitar at all, even with the best sounds it still ends up being very soulless. As a guitarist myself there are a ton of nuances with the instrument that the midi cannot capture - the subtlety or forcefulness of the left hand touch, the level of pick attack used, or possibly no pick at all, the expressiveness of vibrato and bending (midi fonts typically limit this - you usually can't really adjust the level of vibrato or the degree of accuracy of the bends - hey, sometimes inaccurate bends sound great, especially in a really ballsy, bluesy setting), all that sort of thing. Bass you can kind of get away with but you're really better off with the real thing, and drums just sound cheesy and lifeless. I am aware that modern electronic drum sounds are very realistic and I have been quite impressed myself with electric drum kits, however they're still lacking that certain something. Your typical computer midi fonts aren't going to be nearly as good as those electric kits, either.