What Makes a DAW Guitarist-Friendly?

[Craig Anderton]

One of the reasons I use Studio One is that, even prior to Fender, it was guitarist-friendly. There are several reasons why.

Guitar voicings tend to be "wider" than piano voicings; for example, consider a simple E major chord on guitar, and where the notes would fall on a keyboard.



Remember, a guitar is six monophonic oscillators on a plank of wood. Voicings cover a wide range of notes in a compact space. Pianos allow two hands to play up to 10 notes over a wide range. As a result, guitarists tend to play in one of two modes: four- to six-note chords for rhythm guitar, and single-note leads that treat the guitar more like a sax.

DAWs grew out of sequencers, which were MIDI-based. That MIDI emphasis is in their DNA. So...what makes a DAW guitarist-friendly for me is how well it can merge what a guitar player does with MIDI and a DAW's keyboard heritage.

Studio One's Chord Track can parse a guitarist's chords and generate a chord chart, as well as control MIDI devices to match the chord structure defined by a guitar. This is a huge feature for guitar players! The Chord Track's ability to choose narrow or wide voicings gives guitar players flexibility on whether they want voicings that more closely resemble guitar or not.

Even with Melodyne Essential, it's possible to extract polyphonic MIDI data from a guitar part. v8 takes this further. I've been impressed with how well it extracts notes from polyphonic guitar parts. This is another way guitars can merge with MIDI in v8.

There are also the little things. The tuner can handle alternate tunings, and can appear in a Channel's micro-edit view for quick touchups.

Other MIDI features are ideal for MIDI guitar, like being able to see all six strings of a mono mode guitar in the Edit window while editing only one string, and being able to create multiple external devices from a single MIDI guitar to drive multi-timbral instruments. It was also great when Studio One introduced the ability for an audio track to send MIDI data to a different track. This allowed using the Jam Origin guitar-to-MIDI software.

There's also the issue of signal processing. Many guitarists use sophisticated pedalboards with parallel routings. The FX Chains allow creating these kinds of guitar-friendly pedalboards within individual channels. Unlike amp sims, FX Chains make it easy to mix and match amp modules with studio effects. Many other DAWs require cumbersome bus-based routing to create the kind of parallel processing guitarists use. The Splitter also encourages multiband processing, which can help reduce intermodulation distortion with high-gain amp sims.

Of course, there's room for improvement. I'd like to be able to restrict the instruments in a multi-instrument to individual MIDI channels for mono mode MIDI guitar. This would be much more convenient than having, for example, six Mai Tais in their own tracks. Also, Studio One doesn't implement the workaround some other DAWs implement to avoid "channel scrambling" with MPE, which is a limitation of the MPE spec. But the above should give an idea of why I prefer using Studio One, and now v8, with guitar compared to other DAWs.

 

[Craig Anderton]

Speaking of panning - FSP 8 isn't the only program with dual panpots, but the addition of that feature in v6 accommodates the way many guitarists layer rhythm guitar parts. Because the rhythm guitar has a maximum of six notes, it's common to layer two guitars with different voicings or processing treatments, and pan then left and right. With the dual pan, you can pan one guitar from left to center, and the other from right to center. That gives the kind of wide, layered sound that's obtainable so easily with keyboards.

 

[BBS_N0d3]

A guitarist-friendly DAW is mostly about not getting in the way. Fast setup, flexible routing and tools that respect real guitar voicings instead of forcing everything into a piano-roll mindset.

Little things like easy comping, quick re-amping, chord awareness, and pedalboard-style FX chains make a huge difference when you just want to capture an idea and keep playing. When the DAW feels like an extension of your rig instead of a technical obstacle, creativity flows way better.

Great discussion so far.

 

[Craig Anderton]

chord awareness

This is indeed an SO/FSP8 major plus for those who work primarily with rhythm guitar. The idea that a "guitar-oriened DAW" simply needs to dumb down the workflow and include an amp sim totally misses the point. I hope that with Fender involved, there will be ongoing attempts to analyze the DAW from a guitarist's perspective, and make FSP8 a more "universal" DAW. For example, including Tab in the staff view would make FSP8 the DAW of choice for schools and those learning guitar. Also, allowing the amps to response to program change commands would make the show page more useful for guitarists (as well as any instrument going through an amp sim or guitar effect).

Of course, many changes that benefit guitarists would benefit all users, regardless of instrument.

 

[Craig Anderton]

One more thing. The Impulse Maker makes it possible to capture a cab from any amp sim and use it with FSP8. I'm not sure if Fender even knows this is possible.

 

[Bandybum]

Studio One's Chord Track can parse a guitarist's chords and generate a chord chart, as well as control MIDI devices to match the chord structure defined by a guitar. This is a huge feature for guitar players! The Chord Track's ability to choose narrow or wide voicings gives guitar players flexibility on whether they want voicings that more closely resemble guitar or not.

This sounds very interesting.
Have been browsing the studio pro user manual here this morning trying to garner more information on this.
Could you perhaps please clarify a little more - particularly regarding the wide voicings as a guitar on the piano roll?

Cheers

 

[whichi123]

Actually, just adding a guitar fretboard reference, like in Guitar Pro, could solve a lot of problems for many beginner guitarists. But it seems that most DAWs are unwilling to do this…

 

[Gray Wolf]

One of the reasons I use Studio One is that, even prior to Fender, it was guitarist-friendly. There are several reasons why.

Guitar voicings tend to be "wider" than piano voicings; for example, consider a simple E major chord on guitar, and where the notes would fall on a keyboard.

I'll certainly defer to others more skilled at playing keys but that doesn't look unusual at all to me for a two-handed piano voicing. Skilled players tend to do that, spread their voicings out in various ways to get certain sounds.

But I may have missed the point, if so, pardon.

 

[Craig Anderton]

I'll certainly defer to others more skilled at playing keys but that doesn't look unusual at all to me for a two-handed piano voicing.

To clarify, the point I wanted to make was that with guitar, that chord was played with one hand and you are limited to those six notes. I can't do that kind of wide voicing on a keyboard with one hand. However, with keyboard there's the option to create more complex and wide/narrow voicings with two hands. So, I tend to think differently about voicings when playing guitar or keyboard.

 

[OneBass]

For example, including Tab in the staff view would make FSP8 the DAW of choice for schools and those learning guitar.

This is an interesting thread.
A game changer for many bass players would be the ability of FSP to produce high-quality, 4-string bass Tabs directly from a full-mix audio track.

Perhaps a parallel thread titled “What makes a DAW bass guitar friendly?” would be of interest to many who play bass.

 

[Craig Anderton]

Could you perhaps please clarify a little more - particularly regarding the wide voicings as a guitar on the piano roll?

I apologize for taking a while to respond. I posted a Craig's Tip on this in the Tutorials, Tips, and Tricks forum, because this is useful information and it will get a little more staying power that way. Check out the screenshots - they'll tell you what you need to know If you have any questions or comments on the tip, please post them with the tip so that all the information on this topic stays in the same place. Hope this helps!

 

[Jemusic]

Frank Gambale has devised an alternate tuning that allows for much better keyboard chords playable on guitar. Although they are more close voicings. But interesting none the less.

The tuning is A2- D3 - G3- C4- E4- A4

He uses the A D G B strings from a set of 10's as the bottom four strings. (except B is tuned to C) and the D and G strings from a set of 9's as the top two strings.(D tuned to E and G tuned to A) These two strings are tuned to the same octave as they were on a normal guitar tuning. eg the second fret of the D string to create the E sound and the the second fret of the G string creating A.

 

[Craig Anderton]

Frank Gambale has devised an alternate tuning that allows for much better keyboard chords playable on guitar. Although they are more close voicings. But interesting none the less.

That is interesting. Basically, it seems to me like he got rid of the low E, started with the guitar's A string instead of the E string, and did additional tweaks to turn a B3 into a C4 and G4 into an A4.

I'll have to try that tuning on a Variax. One of the reasons I miss the Variax was because it was so easy to try alternate tunings (as long as you wore headphones so you wouldn't hear what the strings were actually playing).

 

[Ken Morgan]

Mine isn't a purist perspective, just a perspective of genre-related and 'that would have never occurred to me" limitations to use anything other than mics and real time performance to get all the guitar related stuff done.

This mindset also justifies why I have so many acoustic and electric guitars, basses, etc, many set up in alternative tunings. One of my favorites is a Martin set up in a Nashville (hi strung) tuning, but the two E strings get tuned down to D quite often...

 

[Jemusic]

I forgot to add this in before. Frank explains it in this video:

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[Stuart Welwood]

they also decided that most customers simply were too ignorant to realize that a "studio monitor" system that only goes so low as 100-Hz was not a piece of junk that makes it impossible to do good and realistic mixes

My memory is that the term "subwoofer" first appeared in common usage when the Earthquake movie was accompanied in theaters with a very large speaker system (made by Cerwin-Vega) that was intended to reproduce the subsonic sounds of an earthquake. At the time, I knew the term to apply only to subsonic, therefore not audible, sound reproduction.

Today, it seems, the everyday usage refers to a single woofer that must reproduce bass frequencies for both the left and right channels. The rationale given at the time these started to appear was that the bass frequencies covered by these speaker systems were (1) omnidirectional and (2) of such long wavelength that the ears could not determine their direction.

I just now ran a 40 Hz sine wave through my Altec Lansing 1205 Voice of the Theatre cabinets, and I can easily hear which cabinet the sound is coming from. Yes, low frequencies are more or less omnidirectional from the point of view of the speaker, but they are not omnidirectional when viewed from the listening position. That said, at some point, very low frequencies can be difficult to locate. Room anomalies can greatly contribute to this effect.

Personally, I would not consider any speaker system that requires a subwoofer. And, why not at least get two?

 

[Craig Anderton]

FSP 8 makes it easy to make a two-channel (“stereo”) VSTi virtual guitar monaural, which then changes the useless “balance” control for the Channel to a true monaural panning control that will pan the audio from far-left to top-center to far-right and all points in between, thereby making it possible to do “flying guitar” and other types of monaural panning like in “Dazed and Confused” (Led Zeppelin), which also works for voices and other instruments.

It's true that you can't change the channel panpot into what you want but there is a workaround. If you haven't already tried this, insert the Dual Panner, click the Link button so the two channels move together with a single Pan control, and choose your pan law. Width has to be at 0 or this won't work.

The pan law option, though, is where it gets interesting! You can have the center drop when the audio pans to center, like most panpots do. If you choose 0 dB Balance, there's no drop when panned to center. However, my favorite is 0dB Balance Sin/Cos because there's no drop when panned to center and the panning curve is slightly different. It increases the rate of a panning change as you move closer to the right or left. For example, with the standard 0dB Balance Linear, if the panpot is 40% to the right, the pan position will be closer to center than if you use 0dB Balance Sin/Cos, which will pan the position a little further to the right. This is really helpful for "pass the bong, dude!" flying guitar effects, because the audio spends less time close to center where the ear perceives it as louder. It's pretty cool.

 

[Soundwise]

As much as I like FSP 8, there is one thing that I miss badly: the ability to assign individual notes to their own MIDI channels. Most guitar libs that I use for mocks and composing, support MIDI guitar mode, which renders proper performance from the guitarist's perspective (The Beatles' Blackbird would be the perfect example).
Since Sound Variations workaround isn't usable in the given context, could I hope for multiply midi channels support within one track in the foreseeable future or is it too much to ask?