Picotalk Blog Compilation

Awhile back I ran into a pair of musicians discussing the way things used to be. They were talking about the days when bands would go into a studio, set up their gear, and try to get their rehearsed "live" sound recorded as authentically as possible. The instrumentalists would select their gear with great care, trying to create the perfect tone for their role in the band while the singer focused on extracting the same quality from their voice.

Indeed, there's a bit of gloss to this picture. It's been around for eons. Musicians at the fore of popular music are always looking for that "new" sound. Something that is familiar enough to be welcome, yet unique enough to stand out from all the other music we experience. One of the earliest ways of getting that uniqueness was to use or create a unique instrument; the result of which is a world full of thousands of different instruments. The desire for a unique sound is not some strange new phenomenon of our modern music culture, it has simply taken on a different shape.

Today, we find most of our popular music is played on a handful of instruments that promise a wide variety and flexibility of sounds, often through electronic enhancements. The most electronicized instrument, perhaps, is the keyboard. Musicans that select a keyboard today have the ability to play an infinite number of unique sounds, limited only by their ability and desire to create new ones. They can record any sound they find and manipulate it in any number of ways to achieve the unique sound they seek. Keyboards are often filled with soundbanks of thousands of pre-set options to select from right out of the factory.

Next up on my list and the point to this article is the guitar. Back when electronic pickups and solid body guitars were first hitting the stores is really when the modern sounds all began. As soon as electric amplification came into play, we were suddenly subject to hums, squelches, distortion and feedback. At first guitarists would try to minimize these effects, but over time as they began to experiment with them, it was realized that the sounds could be both pleasing and exciting. As things progressed, the electric guitar amplifier became a key to defining your guitar sound, and amplifiers were built and developed to provide wider ranges of flexibility to utilize those previously unwanted sounds.

Today artists, such as myself, have gone so far down this road as to get rid of our guitar amps and take on the new age of "digital modelers". These new devices replace the limited amplifiers we've been using and instead provide us with a virtually unlimited supply of "digital" amplifiers that can closely match or emulate the sound of every known amplifier and even those previously unknown. The flexibily of these devices is phenomenal.

Some critics feel that these new digital modeling systems go too far. They suggest that the sounds are not honest, and that the guitarist is not building up a signature tone of the quality found in the past. I beg to differ. For an artist like myself, suddenly I have the freedom to write music that can have any tone I can imagine... if I have the time and patience to search through infinity to find the one I'm looking for.

The sounds are amazing, however, there's a huge cost involved. Sure, a good modeler is fairly expensive, but mostly it's in time. It takes a lot of time to seek out and find the sounds you are looking for, and even more time to figure out how to make it work with the song you've written or are in the process of writing. It's a painstaking process, and it's fraught with frustration. But it is amazing and it is the way it is.

Modeling is here, and it's only going to get bigger. There will always be those of us that love a nicely crafted accoustic sound, and there will be those of us that love a heavily customized electronic sound. Fortunately the diversity is here and we have the tools we need to do the job - hopefully well!

Mickael Maddison