06.09.11
I’d rather hear a real guitar but that’s just me
UPDATED
Google’s Les Paul tribute doodle looks good and sounds little.
A nice idea for a global birthday anniversary that doesn’t capture any of a real guitar’s magic, much less anything made by Les Paul.
I tried it late last night and the problem, as with lots of virtual instruments played with the pointer, is the virtually total lack of expression. You can’t do anything with it that’s remotely like a real guitar. The tonal richness isn’t present. And, of course, there’s no physical contact between the player and the instrument which is what defines the nuance, color and unlimited style of the electric guitar.
That’s all obvious. But still you can’t make it boogie even a little.
You can hear a really lousy stab at — uck — Stairway to Heaven on this thing, here.
You can hear a real Les Paul here in the vid of Cursing the Oilmen (the tone is early Cream although Clapton was more closely associated with the Gibson SG at that point) and here in Hey Cutie.
Stairway to Heaven. Jeebus — it’s just as bad as the wretched musical apps for iKit.
The other point worth making over Google’s delivery of Les Paul tribute was that electric guitars and, subsequently, rock and roll were an export to the world. Things that made life better; something that made others think highly of us.
Now we’re known for selling weapons to pantywaist militaries that shouldn’t have them. And most of the Les Pauls are made in China with the ones made here primarily for the plutocracy and its servants. Or those who now warehouse the old ones because they’ve been bid up as small fortunes.
It’s a complete reversal, the triumph of evil over good in the national identity.
For more on the phenomenon of antique guitar acquisition as the hobby of poxy wealth speculators, see here.
Teaser lines:
Weekly, features writers find the most annoying examples of Grotesquus Americanus. Then [the newspaper] proceeds to portray whatever herd of manipulators it has found as something swell. The point of it is to make you feel stupid …
Update: Rachel Maddow thinks the Google guitar app is really cool. Empirical proof it has no connection with rock ‘n’ roll or actual guitar music played by human beings.
Chuck said,
June 9, 2011 at 8:05 pm
VSL it’s not–and I can even tell that VSL isn’t the Real Thing (the big giveaway are the winds–and the strings are *too* perfect.
But this Google thing is perfectly dreadful–and somehow not actually holding and using a simulacrum of an instrument as an extension of one’s body just leaves me cold.
But then, hiring real musicians costs money, as any film producer will tell you. Much cheaper to hand the music over to a guy with a mouse and a computer and get a half-assed sound.
The proles probably can’t tell the difference anyway.
DD said,
June 10, 2011 at 6:41 am
There’s a demographic, much younger than me, that actually seems to prefer the synthetic stuff. I’m not totally convinced it’s not shamming, though, just for the sake of being irritating.