MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the most wonderful thing. It allows you to plug in any instrument supporting its interface, such as a piano keyboard, and play whatever you want to into the computer. You can then use a DAW (Digital Audio Workbench) such as Cubase to record your performance and then play it back using any instrument in your instrument library. So for example, I could play in a melody line using my piano, and have it played back to me by a flute. In short, by recording track after track using my piano and having the computer play each track back to me via different instruments, I have an entire orchestra at my fingertips just sitting there waiting for me in my computer. Technology is indeed a wonderful thing.
However, there is a problem. Although my computer can technically play my recorded melody line using any instrument I ask it to, what it cannot do for me, is play that instrument in any other way than the way I recorded it in the first place.
This problem is particularly apparent when trying to record guitar lines. Now there are MIDI guitars out there that faithfully reproduce, in MIDI, the performance of the guitarist, but unfortunately I don’t own one and I wouldn’t know how to play one even if I did. So I play my guitar lines in using my piano. However. they always end up sounding just like that, like a piano trying to sound like a guitar. Why is this?
The answer is simply because one doesn’t play a guitar like one would play a piano. The strings on a guitar are ordered very differently to the way the strings of a piano are. This means when one strums a guitar, the notes of the chord will be played in a different order to the way one would naturally play them on a piano. On a piano, one can play many notes all at once. In a guitar strum, it takes time for the guitarist’s fingers to move from plucking one string to plucking the next. For these reasons and others, my guitar lines always end up sounding unnatural.
I have been looking around for a long time for a solution. What I have done more often than not is to ask an actual guitarist to come in and record the guitar line for me, but this is problematic. The guitarist might not be available for a recording when I need him. The beauty of MIDI is it is very easy to transpose a MIDI recording into a new key, not so an audio recording of a guitar. So it was a happy day for me when I finally found the Spicy Guitar Free VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plugin (see www.spicyguitar.com).
Spicy Guitar allows me to play a chord on my piano, and reproduce that chord as it would sound on a guitar. It also allows me to select the type of guitar I want to play (classic, jazz, electric etc.) and change other parameters of the playing style such as how near the neck the guitar is strummed and whether it is strummed with a plectrum or a finger.
Below is a link to an example of a playback I recently produced of Anna Kendrick’s version of “The Cup Song” which has a very prominent guitar part in it for which I used the Spicy Guitar VST plugin.
Using the Spicy Guitar plugin, I can now include more realistic souding guitar lines in my songs. without having to ask an actual guitarist to play them for me.
