Electro harmonix B9 organ pedal for guitar

Anything about hardware musical instruments.
Post Reply New Topic
RELATED
PRODUCTS

Post

And of course the ? is how well does it track?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98u-MDT ... Jd&index=1

Post

I don't believe there are any tracking issues as it's the actual guitar sound that is simply proceeded to sound like an organ, it should have no more issues with tracking than a delay pedal...just a different process. There is no pitch to midi or sound triggering...

I am buying one as soon as they hit the UK, be cool with my variax as I can take the guitar sound via the digital out and put the mag pickups to the pedal :)
X32 Desk, i9 PC, S49MK2, Studio One, BWS, Live 12. PUSH 3 SA, Osmose, Summit, Pro 3, Prophet8, Syntakt, Digitone, Drumlogue, OP1-F, Eurorack, TD27 Drums, Nord Drum3P, Guitars, Basses, Amps and of course lots of pedals!

Post

Thanks, I bet you have to play really clean.

Post

bill45 wrote:Thanks, I bet you have to play really clean.
why?
The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world. It requires profound, purpose‐larger‐than‐the‐self kind of understanding.

Post

Rather amazing. Sad there is no leslie speed footswitch.

Post

It is impressive. Very clever.

I find it hard to imagine there's no digital processing involved. I think I heard some glitching in the demo.

The only way I can come up with to do it analog is...
... compression followed by a "square" gated envelope shaper. Derive keyclick from the envelope edges. A multipole rotary switch to select different filters and different settings of a delay chip (PT2399?) with an LFO for the vibrato/chorus/leslie effects...
Nah, I don't think that would do it.

Surely must be some DSP in there?

Would love to see inside one.

Post

I don't think this would be possible in analog except with such a huge farm of opamps that the noise would be as loud as the signal. A circuit board the size of a banquet table. Consider how sucky was the arp guitar synth, and the arp designers were not fools. They about bankrupted the company trying to make an analog guitar synth viable. Non viable even with hex pickups and a fair handful of hardwired digital chips tossed in there.

I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but no way would I have ever accepted an assigment to pull this trick off, even in the digital domain, non realtime in a puter with relatively "unlimited" resources.

Though of course roland and line 6 have engineers capable of making such things work (more or less).

Then again possibly the device requires an inhumanly accurate guitarist. It wouldn't be the first device with such requirements. Long ago at a namm show this fella was demoing an ebow. He was doing sonic miracles with the ebow, without even breaking a sweat. Very smooth impeccable musical sonorities. So I bought one for guitar friends to record with. My guitarist friends were quite talented, but none of them had a good enough touch to wring anything at all musical out of that ebow. The fella demoing at namm must have been the world champion eric clapton of ebow players to get anything useful at all out of it.

Post

Then again possibly the device requires an inhumanly accurate guitarist.
I noticed this as well. The player was very very stiff and it appeared that on all the guitars played the string gauges were rather heavy. It's the same thing I noticed with regard to the strat triple play (although the triple play had very overt latency on the fender website)

A few of the covers performed were... well less then accurate renditions. I still think it's a nice stomp box for guitar. Granted I'm not selling a ztar for it.
Synapse Audio Dune 3 I'm in love

Post

tapper mike wrote:
Then again possibly the device requires an inhumanly accurate guitarist.
I noticed this as well. The player was very very stiff and it appeared that on all the guitars played the string gauges were rather heavy. It's the same thing I noticed with regard to the strat triple play (although the triple play had very overt latency on the fender website)

A few of the covers performed were... well less then accurate renditions. I still think it's a nice stomp box for guitar. Granted I'm not selling a ztar for it.
Even if the unit is glitch free under all playing conditions, and perfectly makes the organ tone (with no guitar tone leaking thru), then POSSIBLY it will tend to sound more like "odd guitar" and not much like organ unless played very carefully and cleanly, with "keyboard precision". Not that keyboardists are any more precise than other instrumentalists, but in a non broken keyboard you usually don't hear hammer-ons, chord slides, organic bends, chord snatches, strums. Because many things easy and natural on guitar are difficult on keyboard (and vice versa).

It is easily noticeable playing emulative instruments from keyboards. Take a perfect string patch and play it like a piano, and you hear accordion rather than strings. A perfect sax patch played like a piano also tends to sound like accordion.

One time I played around making a voice to midi program, preserving vibrato, pitch and amplitude info. Singing into a synth string patch still sounded like a person singing, rather than sounding like a keyboard playing the string patch, or sounding like a violinist playing the real thing. So the performance was still limited by the ability of the vocalist. The vocalist would have to be good enough to sing like a violinist or it would not sound at all natural.

Beats heck out of me how this box works. Maybe Mike Matthews thunk up a sneaky easy shortcut, but all I can imagine is polyphonic pitch detection and resynthesis, which is a tall order to get glitch free.

Post

EH has the knowledge as far as I noticed.

I have the POG2 and it is tracking very well.
That also can produce something organ like tones in many ways with different attack settings.

Post

lfm wrote:EH has the knowledge as far as I noticed.

I have the POG2 and it is tracking very well.
That also can produce something organ like tones in many ways with different attack settings.
Thanks. You make a good point that it may be refinement of whatever is inside POG rather than something entirely new. Though the POG itself is rather remarkable as far as being relatively artifact-free and low latency.

Found this old thread on the POG--
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... g#p2959816

Post

It is easily noticeable playing emulative instruments from keyboards. Take a perfect string patch and play it like a piano, and you hear accordion rather than strings. A perfect sax patch played like a piano also tends to sound like accordion.
Part of that is mindset and part of that is technique and the last part is physicality of the instrument. One of the things that lead me away from midi guitar was guitar harmonic structure. Take for a simple example "Piano Open Chords" (as opposed to guitar open chords) Piano open chords have a large open area between where the left hand hits it's highest not and where the right hand begins it's lowest note. Using altered tunings and even 7 string guitars still would not make credible Piano Open chords realistic (god help if you had to play cocktail piano on a midi guitar, even a 6 string ztar) Where as in the case of a good representation of sax on a midi keyboard..All the ones I've heard use breath controllers an expression pedal and more cc controllers while the right hand plays the notes. Eigenharps are prolly the best device one can have for playing midi wind instruments.

Much of stringed instrument realism is really quite demanding and while I can say I'm really impressed with Keytar Jeff Abbot and Real Guitar. There are certain aspects that seem to get missed. Like how close the bow / fingers / pick etc are to the bridge. pick/bow direction Bow swell fret position and string gauge also affect timbe. Modulation is a poor substitute for vibrato. Guitar vibrato includes both volume and pitch rate for both is controlled by technique rather then a simply how far one pushes the wheel.

All of the above under consideration finding the perfect or near perfect vi for the job coupled with desire can make all the difference. I found a vox continental vi once that blew me away, the next thing I was carving out a highly credible renditions of some tunes by the Doors and others who used continentals during the 60's ... On my ztar no less. I was in heaven. Quite often I get the same sensation using GSI's VB3 I find a tone to love and it inspires me to coax the most out of it.
Synapse Audio Dune 3 I'm in love

Post

After some searching around it does indeed seem to be based on the POG. So, looks like it's mostly built around pitch shift DSP. Tracking isn't an issue - it shifts what it gets to produce drawbar footages. There is some lag as there are buffers to fill.

Post

SLiC wrote:I don't believe there are any tracking issues as it's the actual guitar sound that is simply proceeded to sound like an organ, it should have no more issues with tracking than a delay pedal...just a different process. There is no pitch to midi or sound triggering...

I am buying one as soon as they hit the UK, be cool with my variax as I can take the guitar sound via the digital out and put the mag pickups to the pedal :)
Oooo, sorry to go off topic, but what Variax model do you have?

On topic: I really like the pedal, I honestly would consider getting it. Sounds a lot better than the garbage boss puts out to try to sound like an organ, what is it called, the multi overtone or something? Meh.

Post

anyone get this yet?

Post Reply

Return to “Hardware (Instruments and Effects)”