Could iOS ever have an Avatar?

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What would be nice would be to see the work done at Arp nearer to becoming finished. The Arp Avatar was a particularly interesting synth to me, limited only in two ways:

1. It cost a lot of money, and as a British teenager at school in Australia at the time it came out, I had none. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time on it in major music gear shops in the centre of Melbourne, when I could, recording random twanging into my cassette recorder (the guitar the shop had it wired up to was quite inconsiderately a right-handed one, hence I couldn’t play it. However, I still couldn’t play my left handed guitar at home — I knew two ‘chords’ and none of the strings, and many years later discovered that one of those wasn’t actually a chord after all) (but at least I could pose with it).

2. The second way in which it was limited was that although it had a hexaphonic guitar pickup, and a hexaphonic fuzz input stage, after that it was effectively controlling a monophonic normalised subtractive synth. In fact, it was a keyboard-less Arp Odyssey from the pitch conversion point onwards.

Well, we’ve got Midi Guitar (recently updated to Midi Guitar 2) and possibly other things, that can give out hexaphonic midi — one channel per string. This is quite important, keeping the string channels separate. When I had my “proper” studio setup (i.e., physical synths you walk between, not push a finger across) I used my Roland GI-10 and GK2 pickup on my Hohner G3T-LH guitar to drive an Oberheim Matrix 1000 (in the end, three of them).

The Matrix 1000 is six note polyphonic with a ‘guitar’ mode that drives each channel separately (i.e., you’d set it for a channel, say, channel 4, and it would then sound the first note of polyphony from channel 4 midi reception, the second from chanel number 5, the third from channel 6, 4th from midi channel 7, 5th from ch 7, 6th would be midi channel 8. For example. You could choose the lowest channel number and it would take six channels starting from that).

It’s important to keep the channels separate so that the pitch bend is separate, that way it sounds as honest and messy as a guitar does and becomes very guitar like. It even gives authentic sounding unwanted handling noise that could never have come from any other means. Otherwise, it simply sounds like you’re playing a chord on a piano patch and waggling the pitch bend lever on a keyboard, which is never going to be guitar like at all.

Well, if an app manufacturer were ever to set up their production lines to manufacture an Arp Odyssey iPad synth app, I’d suggest that instead, do that but also make it switchable to become an Arp Avatar. Improve it over the originals by making it hexaphonic in a manner conducive to using it with guitar to midi apps such as Midi Guitar 2 or the like. Under those circumstances lose the keyboard so as to ‘become’ an Avatar. That way, the app is switchable between Odyssey and Avatar (except now polyphonic, which the originals were not).

http://www.synthfind.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/avatar.jpg
picture from http://www.synthfind.com/arp/arp-avatar-22/

anickt

Like this idea. I had the orange and black Odyssey. Great synth.