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Electrical guitar playing techniques

RobbertZH

Active Member
Over the years I have bought a few electrical guitar libraries for kontakt, especially to create lead guitar parts. These libraries contain many different articulations. But as I am a keyboard player, but not a guitar player, sometimes I do not know what the playing technique actually is and especially when to use that in my playing.
By not knowing this, my solo lead guitar lines sound less good and realistic then the library demos of the manufacturer.

Today I found this usefull youtube video, in which you hear many (all possible?) articulations played during one take by a guitarist.

Including playing with your teeth. I cannot remember that this articulation is included in any of my electrical guitar libraries. :)

 
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PS: There are a number of electrical guitar libraries that include midi files for various of their demo songs, so I should study those during my christmas holiday to learn how to create more realistic lead guitar. For example:

Evolution Rock Standard
from Orange Tree Samples.
There are midi files for three of their demo songs:

https://www.orangetreesamples.com/products/evolution-rock-standard

including:

https://www.orangetreesamples.com/audio/Phantomime.mp3

V-Metal
from Prominy.
For many of their demo songs midi files are available (only for the guitar tracks, not for the accompaniment). And they include new patches for Guitar Rig 5 and/or Amplitube 3 to get the exact guitar sounds of the demo.

https://www.prominy.com/V_METAL.htm

including:

 
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It doesn't even include Paul Gilberts Electric Drill!

Special articulations for orchestral strings are covered now with more specialised libraries (which became available only in the last three years). So maybe this will also happen for electrical guitar libraries in the future.
For example the teeth and the drill (as seperate articulations, not recommended at the same time). :shocked:
 
Some techniques are mostly for looks on stage, and not for the sound (and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2U1ysIEyqc (I would know, having done plenty of that myself)), but yeah, sampling some extended guitar techniques is one of the million things I want to sample someday. Got a pretty good feedback model, got a tremolo model which bends different strings by different amounts, but all those weird Sonic Youthy things like holding a note and thumping the body, scraping the strings with various objects etc...
 
Some techniques are mostly for looks on stage, and not for the sound (and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2U1ysIEyqc (I would know, having done plenty of that myself)), but yeah, sampling some extended guitar techniques is one of the million things I want to sample someday. Got a pretty good feedback model, got a tremolo model which bends different strings by different amounts, but all those weird Sonic Youthy things like holding a note and thumping the body, scraping the strings with various objects etc...
I played prepared guitar / extended techniques for years. There is a lot to both the way the guitar is prepared and also how it gets played. Here is a short solo section of a longer piece, where the guitar has a bunch of stuff through the strings and I would be both two handed tapping, using my elbow to play the whammy bar and also other articulations . If you ever want to sample extended guitar I can give you lots of ideas for how to prepare and play
 
Some techniques are mostly for looks on stage, and not for the sound (and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2U1ysIEyqc (I would know, having done plenty of that myself)), but yeah, sampling some extended guitar techniques is one of the million things I want to sample someday. Got a pretty good feedback model, got a tremolo model which bends different strings by different amounts, but all those weird Sonic Youthy things like holding a note and thumping the body, scraping the strings with various objects etc...

I'd like to take Uli Jon Roth and have him do his guitar freekout at the end of Fly to the Rainbow, a good twenty minutes worth, then take all the feedback brilliance and make a library. I even already have a name for it: Beyond the Apocalyptic Rainbow! The guy is a master at harnessing frequencies.
 
Yeah, extended techniques are quite a rabbit hole! Some will be difficult to sample in a playable way, but with others, samples will be a lot easier to use because they avoid a lot of the PITA of keeping the thing consistently set up and making the right kind of noise (see Nigel Tufnel stopping his solo to make an adjustment...) or be able to use the whammy bar without needing an elbow. I've been doing those kinds of things with drums a bit, so guitar might happen someday as well. I also have a friend who's got a hammered dulcimer who's built dulcimer bows for it, and wants to borrow a pair of mics to sample it next week, but I can't guarantee that will actually happen.
 
He missed out chicken' picking, nut scrapes, seagull dives, bridge scrapes, pick tapping, feedback sustain, Ebow (not so much an articulation but a different sound), playing with a violin bow, slap strings, pitch bending (by bending the body and neck, not recommended).

So technically, that's not 100% all the articulations! Muhahaha.
 
Some techniques are mostly for looks on stage, and not for the sound ...

So does this mean that there is not only a need for electric guitar libraries for the sound, but also a need for emulating the visuals of a real guitarist? So that it looks like you are playing a guitar (with a drill or with your teeth) while you are actually play a keyboard? :geek:

This is a real demonstration of a dancer whose dance moves are "projected" with artificial intelligence on another person who is standing still the whole time:



On a more worried note ... this makes (manufactured) fake news a real possibility. How will you be able to see the difference between real news videos and fake in say 10 years from now?
 
Back to the original intention of my post:

I want to create more realistic lead guitar with my kontakt libraries and currently it is not as realistic as I want.

One of the reasons is that I am not used to play "wrong" notes (out of scale), while a lead playing guitarist often does. This is explained in the following usefull video:

 
Yeah, realistic lead guitar doesn't really need THAT many articulations - regular plucks with a few velocities, hammer-ons and pull-offs, plus decently realistic vibrato will cover most styles. Two-handed tapping and pinch harmonics for shred (though tapping is not a very different sound from hammer-ons), feedback for a few genres, and that's really it unless you're doing avant-garde noise or free jazz. Understanding what a typical guitarist would do in a given style is probably the most important thing.
 
Another video (I cannot find many about this subject) about the subject of playing "wrong" notes right in a lead guitar part:

 
Playing with your teeth is a gimmick just to show off your chops. Nothing about it sounds better than any other techniques. If you want that sound, just get a guitar pick with teeth like edges so it kind of catches on the strings a little. Just kidding. But seriously, not a great sound.
I've been playing guitar for 23 years and I'm sure I still don't know all of the techniques. So I'm sure I'm not the best person to ask about that. I will never use a VI to do leads. However, for convenience and/or mock ups, I will use Guitar plugins that have a nice strummed or plucked sound. The trick then is to try to play it more believably. For instance, playing a big chord with a bunch of close notes (Cmaj11) would be pretty much impossible. Yeah, you could do it with different octaves or just keeping the fundamental notes. But doing a big, dense close-together chord like on the piano, no way. So I try to keep that in mind when I'm playing through a MIDI keyboard.
No rule against doing it anyway. Sometimes I want realism, other times I don't give a dang.
Sorry if this all wasn't what you were asking.
 
It seems to me that what you are wanting is insight in to how a real guitarist plays. That varies according to style - classical guitarists will play very different fingerings to rock or blues guitarists. Rock and blues guitar is heavily constrained by particular fingerings, which in turn constrain the types of scales that are typically used. You can see that on those videos. Bending into and away from consonant notes is a large part of guitar playing - varying tremendously between players and styles.
eg John Scofield is probably the most sophisticated electric player in terms of articulating individual notes within a melodic jazz framework. He is much more like a classical player (or good singer) in the way each note works as part of a musical phrase.

A lot of guitarists in popular rock style music don't do this - guitar has another function as a textural, rhythmic and harmonic instrument (eg Johnny Marr with The Smiths, The Edge with U2).

Still in that rock tradition Jeff Beck articulates notes more sensitively.

Guitarists like Slash can barely play based on what I have heard them do - yet a lot of people love that as well
 
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