Synth Options

Jetfire · June 2014

So, what are options for doing Synth style things with my guitar? Budget would be not alot but what are the possibilities these days?

not_the_dj · June 2014

The Zoom G3 and Line 6 M series have a few synthy options, you can pick those up second hand easily.

What sort of sound are you after?

The EHX Micro Synth is as mad as a box of frogs (and big and expensive) and I failed to get anything that useful out of it. Plenty of glitchy lofi noise, but that wasn't really my thing.

frankus · June 2014

s/h g2 and a vg88 - around £150 ?

shady · June 2014

EHX Superego?

hugbot · June 2014

I think its best to be specific about what kind of synthy thing you want. Synthy leads, pad sounds, bassy wub wubs. ect

Jetfire · June 2014

Apologies, i should have said. Mainly keyboardy sounds so I can put do some intro's. Examples of stuff could be:

Let Me Entertain You - Robbie Williams
We Found Love - Rhianna

ICBM · June 2014

I would just find some guitar sounds that work. Trying to accurately copy keyboard sounds with a guitar is a fool's errand in my opinion - guitar synths are for playing synthy guitar sounds, not keyboard synth sounds.

For what it's worth, I play We Found Love in my acoustic duo… on an acoustic guitar

. Always goes down well.

If you really, really do want to play keyboard parts properly you're going to need some sort of full-on system with a hex pickup, like the Roland GR/GK series - you can't do it with a simple mono electric guitar signal.

I've owned both one of these (which I hated and never got on with) and several synthy-guitar things (including a Micro Synth which I loved and found fantastic, but foolishly sold when I wasn't using it) so I may be personally biased though.

hugbot · June 2014

Jetfire said:

Apologies, i should have said. Mainly keyboardy sounds so I can put do some intro's. Examples of stuff could be:

Let Me Entertain You - Robbie Williams
We Found Love - Rhianna

Both of these are gonna be a pain in the butt to play with any guitar set up. The attack of a keyboard is totally different to the attack of a guitar.

In fact I'd go as far as to say it would probably be EASIER to just buy a synth/sampler and learn to play we found love on that than to try and replicate it on guitar since its a pretty simple keyboard part.

octatonic · June 2014

Learn to play some keys.

You can spend many hundreds of pounds failing to get the sounds that you can get easily with a £100 used keyboard from gumtree.

ICBM · June 2014

This has been posted before but it's worth repeating…

dano · June 2014

you could try re-arranging them so they work on guitar. I could see let me entertain you working well as a set of furiously strummed chords. The song (to me) is very Who inspired so just pictuere how Pete Townsend would play it.