SynthAxe: Difference between revisions
From Allan Holdsworth Information Center
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"That’s what I see with a complicated instrument like the '''SynthAxe'''. It’s still a tool. Music, the sound that it makes, is what’s important. What makes it is completely irrelevant. | "That’s what I see with a complicated instrument like the '''SynthAxe'''. It’s still a tool. Music, the sound that it makes, is what’s important. What makes it is completely irrelevant. | ||
==[[One Of A Kind (Guitar Shop 1995)]]== | ==[[Allan Holdsworth: One Of A Kind (Guitar Shop 1995)]]== | ||
“You won’t find me playing '''SynthAxe'''s much anymore, either. I quit playing one because the company went bust and I worried about owning a dinosaur that I could never get fixed. So I sold everything, including two '''SynthAxe'''s and a bunch of synthesizers. But then a few months ago, I started missing it, so I traded a guy I know two guitars for his one. It has some problems, though. I also don’t use guitar synth live anymore. It was getting more expensive to tour, and the biggest expense of all was transporting equipment, especially if we were going to a different country. We’d spend more money on that than we’d make at the gig. Plus, at one point I was using the '''SynthAxe''' for 50 percent of the material, and if it didn’t work for some reason, there went half the show. So it became a liability, even though I love the instrument. On Hard Hat Area, I only used it on the title cut and a solo in “Postlude”. I haven’t tried any other guitar synthesizers, either, like the Roland. I think that making pitch control a synthesizer is completely wrong. I’ve heard people do really great things with that approach, but it’s just not for me. I like the '''SynthAxe''' because it’s a controller that I can drive a synthesizer with, but when you stick a pickup on a guitar, the synth responds to all the tuning problems, and that gets to be a real pain. And overall guitar players seem to look at guitar synthesizers as a novelty, whereas for me – who never wanted to play the guitar in the first place – it was like a way to escape from it. And with the '''SynthAxe''' I could hook up to a wind patch and play chords on it, which was really great. I really love the instrument, but unfortunately, it didn’t last. People even used to leave notes on my amps between sets telling me to go back to playing regular guitar. Now I get notes asking me to go back to guitar synth!” (laughs) | “You won’t find me playing '''SynthAxe'''s much anymore, either. I quit playing one because the company went bust and I worried about owning a dinosaur that I could never get fixed. So I sold everything, including two '''SynthAxe'''s and a bunch of synthesizers. But then a few months ago, I started missing it, so I traded a guy I know two guitars for his one. It has some problems, though. I also don’t use guitar synth live anymore. It was getting more expensive to tour, and the biggest expense of all was transporting equipment, especially if we were going to a different country. We’d spend more money on that than we’d make at the gig. Plus, at one point I was using the '''SynthAxe''' for 50 percent of the material, and if it didn’t work for some reason, there went half the show. So it became a liability, even though I love the instrument. On Hard Hat Area, I only used it on the title cut and a solo in “Postlude”. I haven’t tried any other guitar synthesizers, either, like the Roland. I think that making pitch control a synthesizer is completely wrong. I’ve heard people do really great things with that approach, but it’s just not for me. I like the '''SynthAxe''' because it’s a controller that I can drive a synthesizer with, but when you stick a pickup on a guitar, the synth responds to all the tuning problems, and that gets to be a real pain. And overall guitar players seem to look at guitar synthesizers as a novelty, whereas for me – who never wanted to play the guitar in the first place – it was like a way to escape from it. And with the '''SynthAxe''' I could hook up to a wind patch and play chords on it, which was really great. I really love the instrument, but unfortunately, it didn’t last. People even used to leave notes on my amps between sets telling me to go back to playing regular guitar. Now I get notes asking me to go back to guitar synth!” (laughs) | ||
