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Just thought it would be cool to play a chord, and without replaying the chord, slide to another chord and you hear the slide. Kind of what happens when you slide from note to note on ifretless bass. I realise that it might be more complex with chords but just wondered if it could be done. I'm basically playing my guitar and trying to replicate stuff on guitarism. Also it would be good to able to stop the sound of the strings. Either by laying your palm down on the strings, or by letting go of the chord? I've already requested palm mute, so that might do the job too. Thanks
@funjunkie27 Sounds like it'd be better suited for an effect app like AUFX / JamUp / AmpKit than guitarism. The Auto Wah in guitarism does of course have the 'Wah' part of the TalkBox but the full-blown thing would probably be overkill in this app... thoughts?
@Fitz It definitely would be cool to have sliding between chords. The main challenge with chords sliding is that each string would have a different number of intermediate notes to cross (and sometimes in different directions) so time-syncing those is not trivial. It's easier if you're just going e.g. F major to G major since every note just goes up by 2, but not so easy sliding between F#dim and Cmaj7
As for stopping the sound, you can do that today by letting go of the chord, if you've enabled the 'fret muting' technique. Demo video:
Yes, I figured sliding between chords wouldn't be easy. But cool about the fret muting mode. I missed that you could still play chords on my tour around the different techniques.
Perhaps slide could be an option if you have power chords on? Or some future other fixed barre chord voicing.
@syrupcore @Fitz Yep that'd simplify it for sure. Though... if I figured out a way to make it work for any two chords (no matter how complex / different), would that be interesting / useful or would you mainly use it for power chords anyway?
Makes sense to me @Rhism.
@rhism I don't think I'd really use it for chords, just sharing an idea. Though, when you get to lap/pedal steel samples... Different story!
@syrupcore I doubt I'd ever do a lap/pedal steel though you never know
Maybe for lead guitarism...
Personally, I'd be happy with sliding up or down 1 or 2 frets (maybe 3 to be sure), so any 2 chords would be fine. Not power chords in general, more subtle jazzy stuff - melodic harmonic lines, if that makes sense.
@Fitz Interesting, can you give one or a few examples of two jazzy chords you'd like to slide between, that you do on a real guitar?
Would be easier to video examples if I can work out how to post videos here
@Rhism, I'll give you an example video! Pretty much any chord that frets and/or mutes all the strings can qualify for this.
Or here's something from an actual guitar player
Having a way to do this kind of thing in Guitarism would be wicked cool.
@rhism correct me if I'm wrong but I think the issue here is that with 10 ways to voice an Em11 guitarism errs on the side of 'sounds best' with its sample set. And that may or may not be equally distributed across the strings as two voices higher than Dm11. So to glide from one chord to another may involve some strings going down two steps, some going down five steps and some going up!
If that's the case, seems the only way to make this happen is to add an option for fixed shape voicing. Which would be very cool but I imagine it may not always sound as good as the chords do now.
Or maybe just add sliding to MIDI out and make the voicing and sliding Jesse's problem.
Most of the examples in that second video can probably be done with any of the current chords using something like the alt chord buttons and pitching the current samples down a half step and then bending up (not to make creating that sound trivial - just plausible!). I was thinking the original request was more like a fretless guitar. I'd likely use that sort of sliding action. Plus, that's just steps away from tremelo arm!
@Fitz @sonosaurus @syrupcore really interesting discussion happening here... couple quick thoughts
Fretless and fretted (fret-ful?) slides sound very different from each other. The slides I'm interested in are fretted, and I think that's what we're all talking about for the most part. I don't think they can be done properly with a pitch bend - there's a slight attack that takes place when the new note starts that needs to be incorporated into the sound. GarageBand does a good job of this. I do want to do a whammy bar too but that'd be a separate thing.
Jesse's talking about sliding up into a chord and sliding down out of a chord, not sliding between two arbitrary chords. This should in theory be much simpler to implement (though not sure what the gesture would / should be without colliding with existing gestures) cos every string moves the same number of notes in the same direction. It might also be a lot more interesting / fun / useful wrt musicality. It can kinda be done in guitarism today by setting up the alt chords in a specific way but that's pretty cumbersome, ideally it'd be its own technique that has its own gesture. I can see it being chained with a hammer-on or pull-off for even more interesting combo expressions.
@syrupcore: yep guitarism uses a voicing that 'sounds best' and in some cases one that's never played on a real guitar, and in some cases the voicing isn't fixed but varies depending on certain factors. so if needed I could do fixed shape voicing but only trigger that on a slide, since my voicing selection is somewhat dynamic anyway.
@Fitz is the slide you were talking about the same as what @sonosaurus demonstrated in his videos, or something else?
@Rhism Interesting stuff, curious about how this is going to pan out, including the Whammy Bar.
As for voicings, since they are dynamic and, as you say, sometimes don't correspond to actual guitar voicings, would it be possible to (optionally) display the notes for each string, to assist with picking? I realize and appreciate how Guitarism is more about strumming, but sometime one wants to throw in a couple of picked notes in between strums...
@mmp Yeah I've gotten a couple requests for an optional "display the notes" feature. I think that'd be good and will try to add that in sometime
As for the general topic of slides and whammy etc... the more I talk about this stuff the more I think I should just start making lead guitarism since its interface will be much better suited to some of these things.
@Rhism thank you!
...and yes, I think it would be great to have a seperate Lead Guitarism app with its own dedicated interface instead, and without Guitarism becoming bloated or unwieldy.
@Rhism said:
That's what I was thinking. I've definitely done something like it with the method you described - by setting up alt chords. It sounds good but yeah, your point about attack speed is spot on; it's not quite the same (nothing like an implementor's thoughts to get you to consider what's actually going on).
There is a pitch bend involved with a slide on a physical guitar but it's more of an intonation wavering/bend since it's a fretted instrument. Like, as you go up a fret you sort push the first chord to its upper intonation limit, then jump to the next chord, starting at it's lower intonation limit and going up to the actual chord. Most of us likely go past it a bit, to varying degrees (on each string!), before we settle our hand on the target chord.
On reread, this may have been unclear:
"That" refers to the slides in the second video, not fretless guitar.
I use it a lot in my 3d guitar playing.
The simplest implementation I can think of is to add two more alt chord buttons (slicing the current pair in half). How they react is the hard bit because of the timing and speed. Push the bend up button and the next strum slides up to the target chord? Sure, but probably cheesy sounding in practice because the speed of the slide is so tempo/song dependent. That video is great and right in the sort of wife-left-me blues sweet spot. Totally different from James Brown or, say, Soundgarden, both of whom used the technique to great effect.
@Rhism Yes, the video examples are the kind of thing I was talking about. Fretted guitar. Rarely changing fingers (ie major to minor) just sliding them up and down. It's pretty much a melody line filled out with extra notes to harmonise into chords. IFretless bass can do this by holding more than one finger on and sliding up and down, I just thought it would be more economical to play the notes in Guitarism and then slide the chord if possible. I can see the problem with more and more gestures though. Also it would be good to hammer on from open strings, or open barred strings but having custom chords would do that with existing hammer-on/pull off.
The fingers may slide, but the pitch doesn't, since the frets hold the pitch until the new fret takes over. The main difference on each pitch change is the note attack as there is no strum after the first chord. It's more akin to a chordal hammer-on (ascending) or pull-off (descending) where the effect is repeated for each fret passed.
@PaulB, exactly, and as @Rhism seems to have a pull-off attack implemented already, it should just be a matter of applying that to all the strings in quick succession as it slides.
The main trick is figuring out what kind of gesture to squeeze in that lets us do it. I was playing around on the iPhone version and the short-dimension tilt is one possibility (obviously only after enabling in the options). On iPad, the secondary chord switch bars could be segmented, one pair with same behavior, and additional pairs that do a temporary transpose of +/- N frets, but behave similar to hammer-on/pull-off and do the fret slide to get there. So for instance if you have a G9 chord pressed, and you press the (new) -1 modifier, it effectively becomes an F#9, and strumming then releasing it will do the 1 fret slide up. I could see fitting in +/- 1,2,and (maybe) 3 fret buttons.
@syrupcore Hmm, I'm not sure what you're on about. I just checked on my guitar and I don't notice any actual 'intonation' or pitch shift when checking the front of the fret space vs the back with a nice tuning app called Total Energy Tuner.
@syrupcore Oh, weird, sorry. I guess I don't really get what's happening then when I waver my finger left to right on a fret - it's definitely a pitch shifting vibrato. Wouldn't that be (perhaps subconsciously) noticeable when sliding a chord from one fret to the next?
@syrupcore not that I could tell.
@sonosaurus, I was thinking something similar (splitting the chord bars) but I'm still not sure that's a complete solution. I just messed around on my guitar for a minute and styles affect the slide speed so much. Maybe I'm over (under?) thinking it but the differences are pretty well displayed in the two videos you posted. How would you tell Guitarism what speed you want? Faster strum (before release of the chord bar) = faster slide? Tempo based? Sliding the actual chord finger (original request!)? That seems problematic because of... intonation! Guitarism would be guessing each time if you mean to bend or are just off a bit on your finger positioning (like the strength knob on the Animoog keyboard).
I also noticed when experimenting a bit that there is a distinct 'string' sound when sliding up a fret that isn't present when doing hammer-on/pull-off. I tried going both directions across a single fret to minimize differences. When doing hammer-on/pull-off, there is a softness to the sound where as sliding adds fret noise/high frequency content. There's almost a new (type of) attack.
There may well be a slight change in string tension when sliding chords, as there is when producing vibrato, but it would be in the opposite direction to the slide (increasing on downward slide, decreasing on upward slide) and is not the overriding characteristic of the sound.
I did say 'akin' to hammer-ons/pull-offs, not 'same as', it is a different attack.
@paulb Cheers for the explanation; the reverse effect makes sense. I wasn't trying to correct you about hammer-ons/pull-offs. Just adding more data.
Yep it's a subtle attack effect (which I already have for hammer / pull) plus some string sound which I need to figure out - less of an issue on electric, more important on acoustic. GB does it well. There may be a minor pitch bend effect but that'd be negligible.
I think the gesture would have to involve a chord finger slide. Anything else would be too far removed from the original technique it's imitating. The speed is one obvious gap that shows up due to this removal (there will likely be others).
A chord finger slide should take care of "slide down from a chord" pretty well. Just strum, and then slide your finger to the left (or up on iPhone) to trigger it at the time and speed you want. It doesn't work for"slide up into a chord" though, since strum and then slide right (or down on iPhone) would end up triggering the chord you're sliding from, whereas you want to trigger a chord 1-3 frets below the chord you're sliding to... this is the biggest issue here
@Rhism...... Do you have plans to add IAA to the fantastic Guitarism?
@jfeheley Eventually yes but not many people asking for it right now. I believe there are still complications with the integration (based on the tweets from fellow devs I respect who complain when working on it) so I'd rather focus my time on core value in the app and wait until (a) the knots are ironed out or (b) lots more people are asking for it.
You may have accidently hit on the problem with IAA. You can't iron out knots, only wrinkles. Better let Apple know before they make anything worse...