Actual Virtuality Story with my guitar synth

I had a VG-8 and I felt like I had entered Michael Moorcock's sci-fi universe

So my experiences with music and computers reach back - well because I was always a programmer since 9 years old at some summer camp in the USA. There I learned on a TRS80 Model 1 to program in basic as just one aspect of “summer school” where we had fun subjects like filmmaking, gymnastics and computer programming. Later when I was in my last year of high school I went to university for a “summer school” of sorts and came back to school kind of supercharged.

I lived in USA and we had a piano, but I only toyed with it. Mum had a guitar, nylon string thing she learned to play various songs like Edelweiss from the sound of music. So that was always around for years. Somehow I never managed to land myself in a music class at any schools - and I went to a lot of schools. I guess I didn’t demonstrate enough interest - I kind of felt jealous but it is the lazy that really keeps most people from trying to learn. If they try, they have to work at it.

As an adult, I just went straight guitar and later I had an acoustic and later purchased an electric flying V for fun during university. They were just like more toys and I was a consummate player of toys - electronic games of the very early era. Here is an image - and I had already played the original arcade model - in fact, I had played them since the space invaders and “pong” home game. We had an atari and I don’t know what I did to earn this but my dad and mum have always loved and been kind to me. I played it to death. I only remembered it while I was thinking back for this story.

So - I’ve learned to play guitar, and I can play properly - the blues, rock, folk and more and more pop. I’m slowly becoming professional and I go and work in USA and come home with more gadgets but I somehow can afford to acquire a special pickup that lets you control a synthesizer - one sensor per string. Its this thing again - haven’t thought about it for years but it was mind-blowing. I had this, an effects unit some guitar pedals and this huge flat “pedal board box” and I was performing on stages and with bands. It was the life, and I had a job doing IT work for a hospital but I decided to resign after a few years to play music. I found reasons to justify that - and that same kind of decisions lead me in my future towards even more bizarre lifestyle changes. This synthesizer had all kinds of neato presets - you can see some kind of Jupiter8 thing. I never knew what most of those were by any exposure.

I guess you could say this was my first “professional synth”.

One day I parked on the streets near work and well, my whole set of gear was just too inviting. My car and all the gear was stolen - never to be seen again. My mother had insured my equipment - and having amassed so much stuff by then I didn’t argue. It turned out to be one of the insurance companies’ biggest payouts but the car really was stolen and recovered so they couldn’t say it wasn’t so. There was a lot of money and they told me to go shopping - I found this thing that was like some kind of next step - instead of many things I would tell them “this does all the things in one package”. It was $7000 - that’s a lot - and they paid the bill - and that thing was never stolen. My house was robbed and another thing - a rare jazz guitar was stolen but this VG-8 at that time was in a shabby box (its original box) that I toured it with wrapped in an old thick woollen jumper. So it escaped notice - they were likely really happy to have found the guitar. So a mixed experience.

“The Roland VG-8 is a breakthrough guitar processor that uses advanced modeling technology to emulate the most popular guitars and amplifiers in music history. Using Roland’s Composite Object Sound Modeling (COSM) technology, the VG-8 combines multiple "sound objects"—like double-cutaway guitar bodies, vintage tweed amplifiers, and humbucking pickups—to create a perfect reproduction of these components that can be played from any steel-stringed guitar with a Roland GK-2A pickup. The VG-8 also has a built-in polyphonic pitch shifter for creating 12-string guitars and open tunings as well as a complete digital effects processor and parametric EQ.” https://www.roland.com/us/products/vg-8/ [discontinued product]

Returning to the days when my VG-8 was bought, I had this indescribably powerful experience- well look at it, it looks like a steel bomber but the shape and design are not just for looks. It’s the angle, the pedals. It is in my estimation one of the ultimate creations that anyone ever developed and yet - like so many things like it - it was too expensive and guitar players were not really looking to go “virtual reality”. They would always find some reason to whine but me, no way. All I did was blow minds with this thing - I was a computer programmer with a guitar and I built a fairly good set of my own sounds. Nerd alert - what you will read if you continue is what it was like for years - me, owning this thing, so blown away that I told strangers on buses and in bars about it. I had read this book by Michael Moorcock (I think) and the character is a guitar player (so yeah, probably Michael Moorcock) - it was sci-fi and he had a guitar that could tune itself up. THIS COULD TUNE ITSELF UP - but in virtual reality! OMG.

I won’t go deep into the sounds but they featured acoustic guitars, then I push a button with my foot and bang a huge dual-stack electric heavy distortion rock sound. I have a pedal that could be different for every sound like you might do with a synthesizer because … well this is a synth. It is a synth that can replicate guitars so perfectly that you can’t tell. Someone literally tested the real sounds versus this and on an oscilloscope, the wave-forms of the VG-8 and what it was creating through its COSM modelling were visually identical. That means sonic recreation of the sound through modelling had been accomplished to a huge degree of perfection by some genius. The only real criticism is that my friend noticed a minuscule amount of delay between picking a note and hearing it - that is true but it didn’t bother me it was almost imperceptible. Compared to my GR-1 synth this VG-8 sound was instantaneous. This thing wasn’t detecting notes and creating it was using the guitar string as a sound and recreating it within the model - hard to explain but amazing. Today people don’t seem to do that so much … whatever software they developed is probably still a trade secret.

In those days you could buy a very powerful Mac computer (before imacs, ibooks or ipads or anything modern) with a PowerPC CPU. None had 2 CPUs but this did … this had dual processors and that is why it was expensive. Someone had put a full-blown software into this because … well, nobody was going to drive around and put a computer on a table and plug a guitar in. The cable, would fall off the table, the screen would get kicked in - it would get beer on it. This was a very strong metal box with a sealed computer inside and it was very reliable. It probably still works to this day, I gave it to my friend before I left to live overseas. Why? I was renouncing all the guitars then .. crazy eh. Synthesizers have computers in them but they are usually not very powerful and their specialized design makes them do what they have to. With the VG-8 if the song had a synth, a flute - whatever … i could summon it up and flick back to a working man’s guitar sound as needed.

There were technical challenges- the pickup had this plug with 13 pins wired-in connections and it would make an awful sound if it was loose. So early on, being a bit of a master of making things that don’t seem to work somehow stable I wrapped gaffer tape around the plug so you pushed it in and it gripped the guitar’s body and didn’t move or slip out. It ended up being more stable than a simple mono-guitar cable that most people have to use. I looked for a video to show you what it sounds like and I found this person who obviously has a great appreciation for this tech - “one of the most under-rated …”

So - 30 years later people get it - and how is that - virtual guitar modelling is still ahead of its time. In this video, he is just making different guitar sounds. However, he doesn’t show many sounds so here is someone giving you a taste. The potential of virtuality is that you can have all the instruments you need under the control of your instrument as a “controller” which is also a real instrument with all its nuances and subtleties. This is when they released an upgrade kit - and you basically bought a card that “firmware updated” it. Something everything does more normally via internet or computer but for this, it was an expensive and pre-USB days type upgrade.

So flash forward and I had this successful cover band but we got hired to do a music festival? Why, because we did a lot of blues - as that was what I enjoyed so much - the band was ok with it. We often did whole sets of blues and even showed up at some gigs and got told to play only blues songs. So I’m in this very traditional environment and people jam with us up in the mountains and invite us to play at their festival. I play Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” partly in the style of Stevie Ray Vaughn who I knew most songs (of his repertoire). It’s not a big gig, the crowd is limited but there are many great bands anyway and we all do our sets. Some snooty bands and many of them play before us - weird - because we are not considered “kosher” blues but anyway. This song probably got the most applause of the whole festival - people went mental. I mean, people love Stevie Ray Vaughn at that time - and this song is unusually difficult for most bands.

I use the most huge and epic sound effects - more in the style of Hendrix, wah wah. I have speakers in virtual space flying around as if the mics are stationary and the speakers are swinging on ropes making them do impossible things from the point of view because … VG-8 simulates everything - the body and pickups of the guitar, the sound effect “pedals”, the amplifier, the type of speaker cabinet and the microphone and the position of the speakers to the microphone cabinet, its angle and distance. All setup, tweaked and tested and plugged direct to the sound system blowing people away - and so here is the hitch. Afterwards, all these guitarists want to see my gear - they loved it. Then I show them this box - and they say “no, that’s impossible” they invite me to play at very special parties of blues-loving people where you can sit in with famous players. I take the VG-8 and I’m not allowed to play with it - its not real. They tell me, “you are lying you hid the equipment somewhere and you are joking that it’s that”.

At future gigs they saw me use it in special blues bars and saw it plugged all together with nothing else and so they had to admit I wasn’t lying. That is the story.

One other story is this time when I went to showcase our band, “Music for your Mother” [yes, I know] at a very cool Gold Coast Beach night club and I broke a string - because of the balanced tremolo/wammy bar of my Stratocaster (spring loaded balance) the guitar went out of tune. Then I auto-tuned it with the VG-8 but I forgot to set it to E by holding a bar on the first fret. That is because we tuned to Eb - aka down a half step which makes songs a bit easier to sing and sounds better with big strings … but this was a disaster. We never got to go there again and we played on this very loud crazy stage and we couldn’t hear the mix properly so we knew something was off but we were so well-rehearsed we played a set way out. Terrible stuff - almost made me vomit when I realized what I did. I never did that again - but it’s the kind of thing that is murphy’s law. It’s just weird we didn’t figure it out and play better … no that was just so embarrassing. We wondered - why isn’t anyone getting into it? Ugh.

Live by the tech, die by the tech I guess but - then again - we were playing in many bars around Surfers Paradise and the gold coast regularly and so we got better nicer places and messed up that one audition is all. No big deal.

Here is something I’ll leave you with that I found - someone is using this thing without a guitar by sending triggers of a drum synth into the VG-8 … omg wowzer