How do you produce guitar strumming on a keyboard? There's no arpegiator. How do you do this either live, in styles, or via MIDI?
Starkeeper

LOTS AND LOTS OF PRACTICE! Producing convincing guitar technics on the keys can be quite hard to do at times.. Again like I say to everyone who emails me asking how I've been able to do it, "to play a guitar on the keys, you have to think like a guitar player..." You need to be familiar with different picking technics, and so forth. Granted getting that full strum effect is going to be really hard, especially without an arpeg. Just spend some time on the keys trying differnt things.. Get the strum effect is basically taking that chord on the keys, playing it from left to right, then reversing it from right to left. Doing this gives you the down and up stroke of the strum.. Again it takes a lot of practice.. It took me a long to time to get it down. However if you find that you can't get this to work my suggestion is to play with the presets on the mulitpads. I know your 540 has some electric guitar stums, but not sure on the acoustic.. Also you cannot record them into a song.. More of a realtime feature.

Squeak

[This message has been edited by squeak_D (edited 11-20-2002).]

Forgot to add.. Keep in mind when trying to play a strum you have to play the chord as a guitar pick would going down the strings.. It wouldn't be all the notes at the same time, rather one note after the other, both fowards with the chord and then backwards. After you've done this and can play it to your own personal liking, you must then put a rythmic flow to it.. There are tons of different strums you can do. The 550 would really help you out on this one.. It has those new "folk pick" guitars that would work great with a strum. If you really want to rip out some acoustic strums the best thing would be a keyboard with a good programable arp. I remember my old Roland XP-60 had some killer preset strums.. You can do it with an arranger, but it takes some time to get it down right.... Best to do is slow down the tempo when you're recording the strum... Trying to play it at a tempo of lets say 110-115 is going to tire your fingers out REAL FAST....

Squeak

Squeak,
Wud u recommend 6 fingers, 3 left and 3 right?
Starkeeper

Well how many fingers you use depends on what works best for your playing ability.. When you're doing strums your chords will primarily consist of 4 notes. I'll often use my pointer finger on my left hand for the root note, and then my 1st 2nd and 3rd finger on my right hand to play the chord...

Daniel

Look for a used Oberheim Strummer.
It was a MIDI box that converted chords
to emulate a guitar.
I wish someone would do a software
version.

I use Rhythm'n'Chords plug-in from http://www.musiclab.com/ with Cakewalk. It makes making guitar tracks 10 times easier for me. Once the plugin is loaded, one note corresponds to one stoke type. You can control parameters like, the number of notes, arpegiation speed, and many other things. I am very happy with it.

Shiral

Here is a guitar strum program, that is pretty cool. It gets triggered from the keyboard......it's a free d/l.
http://www.auburn.edu/~jonestb/Bentar.html#downloads

Terry

Or you buy a Generalmusic Genesys! which has a style called unplugged 1 in the country catagory which is only 4 variations of strumming and it is very realistic.
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California

The tyros styles were recorded using a yamaha electric guitar and GR50 midi convertor. That's probably about as close as you will get to realistic strums, though personally I find the strumming effects of the tyros too quantized - for a real guitarist I would expect subtle delays between each note. Perhaps though this could be introduced afterwards using a sequencer.
I produce strumming effects usually by stepping on the sustain pedal and varying the velocity at which I play vamped chords. At the same time instead of hitting the chords all fingers simultaneously, I "ripple" from left to right, takes a bit of practice though! Another suggestion is to split the keyboard and map the same voice to both sides. Transpose the lower split voice up 1 or 2 octaves so that you can play the same sound with both hands. It gives more control.
The key factors include only using 6 notes max at any one time, stick within the range of a real guitar and also study real guitar chords and the notes used.

S.


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Simon G.K. Williams
simon@svpworld.com
Creative Music & Multimedia
http://www.svpworld.com
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