I have just recently (this week) inherited an electric guitar, a Fender Starcaster, previously owned by a now-adult grandchild of my current wife, and before that, one of her sons. Or maybe it was passed on by my deceased brother through his niece, my youngest adult daughter. Whatever... It will eventually be passed down to one of the grand-kids, but I would like to take this opportunity, at age 76, to learn how to play it. I also received a nice beginners instruction manual,
Ultimate Guitar, written by Nick Freeth. Wife has a few other beginners manuals she said she will dig out of her treasure stash for me to practice with.
When we were living in Dayton, Ohio, one of my wife's sons put together a garage band with three of his friends. I don't know how good they were, but their music (and vocals) was very loud, thanks to four guitar amps. They also had an assortment of foot pedal stomp boxes that added some sort of effect to whichever instrument was attached to it. One of them I have is a "fuzz" box. I am anxious to try that to see what it does. There are also several other "effects" stomp boxes the garage band left behind to experiment with. I will (hopefully) get around to finding out what those do too.
At one time I owned a Conn organ and, later, a Yamaha keyboard with a MIDI interface. The keyboard was basically a piano, but paired with a MIDI sound generator it could also be used to simulate almost any musical instrument. I also had a MIDI interface card for an early "IBM compatible" personal computer or PC.
Sadly, I never did become a musician, although for a few years I had a lot of fun
trying to make music. I discovered that recorded MIDI-produced music sounded totally artificial compared with a live performance on "real" instruments. Not enough human-induced randomness in the expression of notes IMHO, but for whatever reason my ears could tell it was somehow different. My most ambitious idea was to write a software program that would capture a live performance and generate a full musical score on paper from what the software "heard." This was in the 1980s and personal computers were not as powerful as they are today, so my ideas never became practical, but I imagined that such software would allow musicians to duplicate the performance of other musicians.
The current state of the art is such that this type of program, and others even more sophisticated, are probably in use today. I watch movies that feature actors repeating some of the performances of Elton John (Rocketman) or Freddy Mercury (Bohemian Rhapsody) and am amazed at how well Hollywood studio orchestras can duplicate the original performances. Of course humans are smart, and it could be that it is easy (or at least possible) for a professional musician to listen to a performance and transcribe a score for every instrument. Hell, early composers like Mozart and Beethoven could do this in their head, somehow "hearing" the instruments as if they were really present. But I wanted a program that ordinary "garage band" musicians could use to imitate popular peformances.
I recently examined all the guitar amps that we brought from Dayton, thinking perhaps at least one was a vacuum tube type. Nope. Solid-state, every one of them. So one of the things on my "bucket list" is to build a vacuum tube guitar amp. And maybe build some large speakers with ported cabinets for better bass... what used to be called a
bass reflex design back in the day.
So, bottom line is I find this thread interesting. I think it is wondeful that someone who is basically a musician ventures to dabble around in electronics to make their music sound better... or at the very least, different.
High-fidelitiy sound is rather easily manipulated using a computer today. First digitize your audio to great accuracy... sixteen or more bits, 24 bits for a wide dynamic range. Second, digitize at rates considerably above the Nyquist lower-limit... 100 kHz for a 10 kHz bandwidth audio instead of 20 kHz... 200 kHz for 20 kHz bandwidth instead of 40 kHz. Anything above 20 kHz bandwidth is a waste of time and money IMO. Most ears can't hear it and most speakers can't reproduce it. Third, dig deep into your pockets for a really fast Digital Signal Processor or DSP module so you can manipulate (and hear) your audio in real time. Fourth, equip your audio editing workstation with some large hard disk drives... at least a terrabyte, and a solid-state drive (SSD) of at least 500 Gbyte capacity. Fifth, make sure you have a "full boat" of the latest DDR random access memory... at least 16 GByte. Sixth, but probably not finally, get a decent digital audio output card... a 16 bit digital-to-analog conversion is an abosolute minimum but 24 bits will provide more "head room" for a wide dynamic range of output. All this will cost several thousand dollars, so put aside some extra for software... maybe another grand or so.
If I were to build a system as described above for audio processing today, it would probably run some version of Linux and take advantage of all the free software enthusiasts post for versions of this operating system.
Good luck on your adventure!
