Craig Anderton

Author / Musician

Guitar Meets Laptop
Live Wire
Hands On
Sound Signatures
From Segovia to Schematics

Why do you think guitarists have been slow to get into computers?

It used to be the guitar players were the people who were always changing pickups, changing strings, trying out different necks, and always messing with their tone. I think the whole idea of custom culture is something that’s still around , but I think the biggest block is that up until recently computers just didn’t have the horsepower to do it right, so you end up with latency.

One of the wonderful things about playing guitar is that its immediate you hit a string you get a sound. You change the angle of your pick, it’s an obvious noticeable difference right then and there. If you have your strings coming back to you twenty milliseconds later, it’s just not really that satisfying. And if some one’s using some of the older pre-ASIO protocols like MME with 40 or 50 or 60 milliseconds of latency, it’s just not even usable.

A lot of it is that the quality of the plug-ins is greatly improved, because we’re now on the third generation with GTR and pretty everybody else is kind of in these same situation; they’ve all been able to refine what they do. So the quality is there, the computers are fast enough to handle the plug-ins, to handle more complicated algorithms. They’re not gonna fall on their knees just ‘cause you ask it to do two instances in a sequence. The less of a hassle it is, the easier it is for a guitar player to start playing, change some parameters around, and get satisfying sound and not have to worry about issues like latency, whether the computer’s gonna be fast enough, and those kind of things. I think it makes a huge difference.

There’s a tradition of hardware…

There's tubes, there's batteries for the stomp boxes, there’s the cables that crackle, but they’re known limits and guitarists are used to it. They understand: “Oh yeah, you break a string, you replace the string.” A lot of them just didn’t want to get involved with computers on the level it was two years ago, but things have changed so much with dual core processors. The whole standard of operation of computers is so much better these days. It can really do justice to the software, so I think that that will help guitarists get more into it. A lot of the point of the book is that it does help explain some of the concepts you need to know if you’re a guitar player, to use a computer in an efficient way, so that it doesn’t get in the way.

How about using computers live?

Some guitarists are doing it already. It’s a short step from having a MIDI foot switch and changing programs in a signal processor to bringing a laptop along. One of the problems has been “what kind of computer you’re going to bring to an onstage situation,” because laptops tend to be sort of fragile. They’re designed more for people to carry around on the road and do XL spreadsheets or whatever and a desktop, well, then you have to bring a monitor and do all the other stuff.

I actually am one of the people whose made the transition to using the computer live. There are two different contexts: one is sort of a DJ remix thing based on Ableton Live, with lots of loops of digital audio going, but I also have the guitar coming into that so and also my microphone as well. Inside the laptop I’ve got the engine that can play all the audio and do the loops; I’ve got the ability to feed in guitar and feed in voice and mix that in as well.

How about other gear?

I have an ancient, no-longer-in-production Peavey fader box with 16 faders and 16 buttons which I use to control the level of the loops and do solos with particular loops. It also does presets, so that’s one way of using it. The other way I use it is with my band, EV2, which is me and Brian Hardgroove from Public Enemy. He plays drums and I play guitar, and I’m running the guitar through a laptop in order to get octave divider sounds, using a Les Paul digital guitar which has separate outputs and also has magnetic outs, so basically a hex guitar not a Roland standard one.

It’s all just regular guitar sounds, so it’s a hex guitar and it’s got a regular set of magnetic pickups on top of that, like a Les Paul. So what I do is I have the bottom three strings going through octave dividers, the top four strings being bussed into a chorus, and then the magnetic pickups go to a flow box which is the Digitech the GNX 3000. I could probably get away with using that in the computer too, but it’s sort of an older Pentium 4 machine and I don’t have to worry about it if it gets lost or destroyed or something like that while I’m on the road. The next step is going to be to get a second laptop to take around with me so I have backup, but overall I have been pretty impressed with the reliability of the laptop live.

Any advice to guitarists who are thinking about taking a computer onstage?

You just have to be careful about certain things you have to be careful about having a stable place to put it and you need to not use the internal connectors. You need to have an outboard interface of some type, but once those considerations are out of the way, I have actually been very pleased with how well a laptop can work.

Now, it really helps to get the kind that are made by companies that integrate computers for music. Those tend to be a lot more reliable than just going to the nearest office supply place and buying the cheapest laptop you can. So that’s a really important consideration but if you think about it, the difference in cost between the two, the cheapest laptop you can buy right now is around four hundred dollars for something that’s decent and yet you can get a really good one integrated for music stable reliable and all that for between one and two thousand dollars. When you think about what you spend on a guitar or an amplifier or anything else, you certainly can’t get a top of the line guitar for 1500 dollars. You can get a very nice guitar but it’s not the very best you can get.

Can you stretch out and jam live?

One of the absolute coolest aspects of doing this and that is with that one guitar because I have the bass sounds. I have a rhythm guitar thing going on and I can play leads over it using the magnetic pickups. I started off playing classical guitar, and I used a thumb pick, so I can actually articulate bass lines with my thumb and play lead lines or hit the occasional chord or whatever with my other fingers. The amount of freedom that we have, basically I can do anything I don’t have to worry about the bass player following along because I am the bass player.

It’s a tremendously huge full sound there’s no way you could get…live…I suppose you could get that with hardware if you were willing to carry around racks and racks of stuff, but to be able to get that huge of a sound with just a guitar for the laptop means that the two of us can make music. Just the two of us can cover the sound: he plays drums and I’ve got the guitar and the bass and its almost like a power trio but with two people. The ability to improvise is just amazing. We don’t use sequences at all. We don’t use any kind of backing tracks; it’s all just live playing and improvisation. I really couldn’t do what I’m doing without a computer-based setup. I couldn’t even come close

Tell us a bit about 21st Century Guitarist.

Well, the whole OpenMix thing, where people can actually change controls and actually manipulate the sound, will help them understand the variety of the sounds you can get from software. The biggest problem with hardware is that you have to have the hardware and if you want to have the sound of 15 different amps and 20 different stomp boxes you need 15 different amps and 20 different stomp boxes. It hasn’t sunk in on a lot of guitarists yet that they can take a laptop and an I/O, stick in a guitar, and really be in pretty good shape.

There are a couple of main reasons I was attracted to doing this book. One is I’d seen the other books in the series and I thought they were really well done. It was a really good concept: they were concise yet pretty complete. I mean they didn’t overwhelm people with thousands of pages but they weren’t pamphlets either. They were just the right amount to get you really going. The things that saved a lot of pages is the whole OpenMix thing, where you can play sessions and listen for yourself and make adjustments for yourself and hear how the effects sound by doing that that saves an awful lot of text description, saying “now when you have a treble control and you turn the control this way…”. They can figure that out for themselves and hopefully encourage a level of experimentation.

What can guitarists expect to learn?

One of the things about the book is, I really tried to come up with applications that weren’t quite what was expected. It’s easy enough on GTR to dial up an amplifier and cabinet or call up the presets that basically have everything already locked up into place and start playing. That’s great; you can get a whole bunch of sounds that way, but one of the things that really appeals to me about having this technology available is the ability to create a signature sound where someone can listen to what you’re doing and say, “Oh wow, I recognize that person’s tone. I recognize how that person plays”

A lot of the book goes into, for example, changing the order of effects or using things like the harmony and also about using MIDI control which is scary to a lot of people at first. But hopefully the book explains it in a way that guitarists can take advantage of MIDI footswitches and MIDI foot pedals and that sort of thing

I can’t stress the OpenMix aspect enough because in the beginning, they learn about how the guitar works with computers and basic things they need to know, but then they jump immediately into taking the song and listening to the song and listening to different guitar parts. And the music’s enjoyable too, so you’re not sitting there listening to something horrible and grimacing while you’re changing the controls (laughs).

It actually makes sense; there’s enough variety in what’s happening that you can really figure out what these things can do and I’m hoping that guitarists will get interested enough, so that they’ll go through all the different examples and really understand what the software can do. It’s really a shame, but a lot of the technology and the products out there these days are really not exploited to the fullest. People find some favorite presets they’re happy with, but if you’re interested in experimenting at all and if you’re interested in coming up with a sound that’s unique, it’s much easier than ever before.

Now, like the EV2 thing I was talking about, once you’ve heard me play with that setup a few times, you’ll always recognize it. It has this sort of huge thundering low end and these other sounds going on and it’s very definitely a signature sound. There’s no other guitar that sounds like that, at least that I know of.

What do you think makes for an instantly recognizable tone? And whose sound do you really admire and appreciate?

In terms of deciding your tone, it’s a totally subjective personal thing; it’s whatever makes you feel the best. When you play your guitar, and it’s fun to play, that’s IT. You’re really pleasing yourself first, and it really is limitless. You’ll never run out of possibilities, you can be as creative as you want.

So, who do I really like in terms of tone? Well, this is gonna sound a little bit strange, but what I’m really interested in more than anything else is making sounds that have not been made before, so I there’s not really that much of a comparison. If you want to talk about it from an experimentation standpoint, somebody like Hendrix, for example, I think was amazing in terms of being able to stretch the technology at that time and produce a really wide variety of sounds with fairly limited palette of tools. Miles Davis would be another person who was able to do that. What he could do with a wah on a trumpet was really pretty amazing. You can always recognize Miles, you can always recognize Hendrix. There’s been so many imitators of both of them and yet they’re instantly recognizable

I’ve really got involved in step-sequencing type things with guitar processors, synching things up in the studio. That’s more for the Ableton Live type of thing as opposed to EV2, but I find those sounds fascinating. They combine elements of synthesis, because I also play keyboards, but they have that warm, organic sort of guitar quality. When you combine the organic sound of the guitar along with the options that synthesizers can do, different modules and envelopes and filters — in terms of guitar effects, in GTR terms you’re talking about octave dividers and equalizers, delays and that sort of thing — you really can create interesting sounds that just arrest people’s ears.

Any new younger players caught your ear?

I’ve spent a lot of time on the net because of my involvement with Harmony Central and every now and then I’ll hear somebody whose doing something really interesting. A lot of it’s happening outside of the United States actually. Some of the ways people are using guitars in dance music and things like that, which are sort of related to R&B, but with an electronic edge. It’s interesting stuff, but it’s hard to know exactly who it is, because there are tracks on remixes done by DJs that are remixed with something else, so I have no idea who the guitarist might be on something.

I’m hearing a lot of creative things coming out of there, and I’m also hearing a lot of creative things coming out of a lot of Caribbean music like Zouk so those kinds of musics are incorporating electronics in an interesting way. The guitar is starting to get into that as well, so you know those are kinds of the areas where it’s happening. I think rock and roll at this point is kind of a mature art form. People pretty much figured out what works. and it is true that you can take a Les Paul and put it through a Marshall, or a Tele through a Fender Twin, and its gonna sound good, it’s gonna sound fine. It’s only gonna make THAT sound pretty much, but it’s gonna sound fine.

Paul Reed Smith is a great example of this. He really understands what a guitar needs to have good tone. He knows how to build it, he knows what kinds of wood to select, he knows what the bridge should be like, and all this stuff has been refined over decades, where any guitar that’s coming out of his factory is just gonna be a good-sounding guitar. There’s just no way around that. And the quality control of the amplifiers and things is so much better than it was back in the fifties and sixties. I know people look at it as sort of a golden age and all that, but every amp sounded different for a reason, and there was a lot of variability with the components and things like that that. You just don’t have today, so that’s pretty much taken care of but there’s this whole other field out there, this whole other type of endeavor using electronics and guitars that make the transition—the same kind of transition that was made from acoustic to electric, there’s a transition from electric to electronic.

Where do you see the technology going?

The thing that’s really fascinating me right now is tempo synchronization and effects and things like that, because the guitar is by nature a percussive instrument. Being able to take that percussive instrument and turn it into a huge variety of percussive instruments, and of course there’s always the option for sustain, so now you have a whole other thing. You have all the percussive sounds, and you start chopping all those up rhythmically. Especially using things like dotted note values, the same kinds of things used for echo times on dance music remixes, on guitar it really starts to move and it becomes a very big sound.

Right now, I’m working on a patch set for a sampling instrument that uses nothing but guitar wave forms, Many of them are just naked guitar, several of them recorded through GTR when I needed some processing. They’re basically put in the synthesizer’s wave forms. It’s really interesting because it’s things that I’ve played on guitars, specifically for being played from a keyboard. It makes for some very interesting options!

How did you get into music technology?

I have the best job on the planet (laughs). If you want to trace it back far enough, I saw Segovia when I was a little kid. I was living in Switzerland at the time I spent a lot of my childhood there and I was just amazed watching him play. I was just mesmerized and I was like, “I want to be able to do that.” Then on my tenth birthday, my parents gave me a guitar acoustic guitar to get started with, and my grandmother gave me a transistor radio kit and nothing much has changed since then!

I was a ham radio operator at one point in my teens while I was also in bands those two elements have always gone together I was always making little boxes for the guitar. At one point I got a bunch of schematics for regular keyboard organs and started looking at some of the processors they were doing in there with inductors and capacitors and thought “hmm I wonder what would happen if I put a guitar through that?”

One thing led to another and I really got a pretty early start in this—by my 22nd birthday I had done 3 albums, played Carnegie Hall and toured most of the US and also had been published by that time in Popular Electronics for a compressor design that I did. This was back in the late 60s, so it wasn’t really common for guitarists to have floor compressors at that time. It was a pretty popular article and one thing again led to another, and I was playing in a band called Mandrake. After that broke up, I went to in New York, did session work for several years, and I got to work with people like Airto Moreira and Cornell Dupree, some really good players, some of the guys from Stuff, which was a bunch of session musicians who put together a group at the time.

I also got involved in production working with the classical guitarist out of Philadelphia named Linda Cohen who’s still active and still playing. Then in the eighties I did a bunch of work in the New Age field mixing, worked on an album called A Valley in the Clouds which was in the top 20 for two years on the New Age Charts. Then my own Forward Motion album came out in 1989 and that actually did reasonable well. I’m thinking of maybe getting the rights back and rereleasing it. It’s been almost 20 years now.

And of course I did all these projects/books/columns in Guitar Player magazine, building your own fuzz and building your own this and that. I’ve always been fascinated by technology and by music; they seem to go together really well.