what will they think of next?

[jrtom]

Crazy J: a guitar-playing machine.

Speaking musically, the tone quality isn't great, but this might be because the recording equipment, or the guitar, is sub-par. Hard to say for sure. It's an impressive project, in any case.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"Y'all are gonna put me out of a job."
-- Tom Petty

The big problem I hear is that it lacks the expressiveness of a human guitar player. Some of this is the harpsichord style string plucking, which brings with it harpsichord style lack of control over dynamics. A lot of the rest is probably software. As I've seen discussed in many rants on the subject, MIDI is biased towards keyboard instruments and doesn't have good ways of expressing kinds of tonal variation that are natural for other kinds of instruments. For example, it doesn't have a clean way to express "finger a new note but don't pluck again" which is a typical way to do phrasing slurs on guitar. Presumedly these guys will join the long list of people who make guitars-that-generate-MIDI or guitars-that-receive-MIDI who all hate their lives for these reasons.