Guitarists, your Days are Numbered

spackbace writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mechanical guitar playing robot, named the Crazy J. The guitar player is composed of two mechanical systems that interact to play a range of 29 musical notes. A plucking mechanism with six independently controlled picks is mounted over the body of the guitar and a fingering mechanism with an array of 23 fingertips is mounted over the first four frets of the fingerboard."

Days are numbered?

[BlueOtto]

The art form will never die... how long have MIDI keyboards been around?

29 only

[Anonymous Coward]

29 notes.. Don't retire just yet.

Just like

[Approaching.sanity]

How player pianos killed piano players.

It's not only about the music

[Parham]

The music is only part of the fun. Watching the musician entertain is the rest. Interaction between the crowd and the musician is what is good about live music. I mean if I wanted to watch a robot play music, I'd turn on Winamp [winamp.com] with a plugin [winamp.com] and go crazy with that.

Is it "perfect"?

[Ghoser777]

Have you ever listened to synthesized music and cringed a little because it was too perfect? I always have that feeling with synthesized trumpets, french horns, etc. I like the variation that "imperfect" humans add to the music. If the robot is always perfectly in time and can't improvise, it won't be replacing good guitarists anytime soon.

still no

[michaelbuddy]

Wouldn't it be more useful to create robots that perform automation on things that humans don't actually like doing. Why are they even creating this when there are tons of jobs, like trimming the overgrowth in my backyard for example, that I would love a robot / computer to do for me, so i could spend time practicing the guitar on my own.

And In other news, still no cure for cancer.

suddenly reminded of a song by rush

[rev_g33k_101]

THE SPIRIT OF RADIO

"All this machinery
Making modern music
Can still be open-hearted
Not so coldly charted
It's really just a question
Of your honesty"

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/r/rush/120011.html [lyricsfreak.com]

I'm not scared.

[SocialEngineer]

The technology isn't there to match the dynamics in picking techniques and subtle stylistic interpretations.

For instance, some swing-beat pieces (in jazz band music, not just guitar music) require a little more sluggishness in the eights, to really capture the groove.

As well, there aren't effective improv algorithms yet for these mechanical beasts :)

Oh sure, its possible to program future machines to match interpretations to exact specifications, but the nuances required to program that are unfathomable when it comes to instruments such as guitars - There are so many dynamic elements to it that it just isn't feasible. Besides, people like watching guitarists as much as they like listening to them.. Thats part of why people prefer live shows to CDs - Nothing is like watching the emotive expressions of a guitar duo while they shred in harmony, knees on the ground, eyes at the sky.

Guitar: A month or so to learn, a lifetime to master.

Bending strings?

[FriedTurkey]

From what I read it didn't mention that it could bend the strings to certain notes. I think that would be very hard to do because you bend the notes at different strengths to reach certain pitches.

Also I would like to see that thing do some Van Halen string tapping. I'll be impressed to see it play "Eruption".

Really cool.. but..

[bmajik]

I've played guitar as a hobby since 8th grade.. and i'm something of a metal/shred fan.

This thing addresses the wrong end of the problem.

I can _play_ reasonably proficiently. I mean, anything most people would listen to i can play without much trouble - technical profiency at guitar _playing_ is not really making anybody money right now. I mean, to a lot of people, metallica is like the end-all-be-all of fast guitar licks and "wild" guitar solos and yet i could play the overwhelming majority of that stuff after a few years of playing while i was in highschoool. There are much much better guitarists out there, who's work i cannot emulate, but honestly, there are very few guys out there where some other guy can't play his stuff perfectly.

The issue then, is not about the ability to "play", but the ability to create.

I can play just about any metallica song.. solos and all.

But i definitely can't write anything like they could. It shames me to admit that i can't even put together an original song as good as a crap band like weezer or radiohead or any of the other stuff that's passed as music in the last 15 years.

Composition is the real gem here, not technical playing ability. If you want to hear a trillion notes per second, check out the artists on the Shrapnel Records label.. nothing but guitar/keyboard maniacs (which i happen to love, but i admit it gets tiring at times ... i think a few less notes might do a better job now and then)

One other thing to consider - i haven't seen/heard the thing play, but something you'll hear from older guitarists is that "95% of your tone is in your finger tips, not your equipment". How effective is the robot at things like bends ? If you listen to a player like marty friedman, he really makes effective emotional use of bends that just _sound_ better than what i can do. How does a robot compare ?

Re:Wow

[poopdeville]

I can play the notes to stairway to heaven. i'm not jimmy page. what makes master of puppets so powerful? is it the notes or hetfield/hammet?

Yeah, you can't play cock rock with a mechanical cock.

It's nothing to fret about!

[farrellj]

I don't think that real guitarists have anything to fret about...it's like Roger Waters says in the film "Live in Pompei" "Give a man a Les Paul, and he doesn't become an Eric Clapton".

It won't be able to compose a Layla, or anything of that caliber...it may be able to *play* Layla, but not create it.

ttyl
Farrell

guitarist, among other things...

Re:Just like

[The Wooden Badger]

Funny thing there is that pianos can't bend strings, so a player piano can do anything a human can do and then some. Even basic guitar has string bends. Then there are bar dives, harmonics, pinch harmonics, tapping...

If you really want to nit pick on the thing, all you really have to do is complain about how it looks like the strings are plucked up and down perpendicular to the guitar body. The strings are going to be a lot more likely to buzz on the frets.

Eh... It's neat from a robotics stand point, but..

[ph43drus]

It's neat, the actuators are a decent design, but it won't replace even a basic guitarist. It can only hold a note down and pick said note. It can't slide, tap, pick harmonics, bend notes, fret hand mute, palm mute or any of a number of other techniques that I can think of.

However, I can understand why they didn't go for those extra features; they would be a bitch to design. So, kudos to them for the whole design, it looks cool, but /. editors should know better than to declare musicians will lose to a machine.

For that matter, people still play chess even.

Jeff

PS Sorry for the rant, it's late, I'm tired, and I'm a guitarist. Struck a nerve...

Re:Days are numbered?

[Scaba]

Yngwie Malmsteen is a pretty mechanical guitarist, so I'd think he'd be easy to emulate - just teach it to play E harmonic minor scales in 32nd notes at 160 bpm. If the thing can play like Howlin' Wolf or David Gilmour or Frank Zappa, then I'll be impressed.

Perfection vs. Expression

[nick_davison]

Anyone who spends any time reading interviews with guitarists will eventually come across some guitarist - it could be almost any guitarist - saying about their favorite guitarists:

The great thing about B.B. is that while other virtuoso guitarists can play twenty notes in the time it takes him to play one, he can "say" twice as much in that one note as they can in their twenty.

It's not even about perfection vs. imperfection. You can introduce slight random imperfection (simply not hitting notes perfectly), you can introduce procedural imperfection that adds specific style (say hitting off beats slightly ahead of the beat in order to create a rock/roll feel - hmm, wonder where that name came from) - but it still doesn't capture it.

It's about expression.

It's about the guitarist who reads the audience and knows the moment when the crowd moves from listening to feeling and can smoothly transition from relatively clean notes to ones where that little extra touch is needed. Add slight vibrato to every note and it's annoying, add it to the right moments and it adds that notion of human soul. And, the thing is, it's different, every night, for the same song, depending on the audience.

It's not about playing the eight bar intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, etc... It's about responding to Jim Morrison deciding to rail on the police who beat him back stage and knowing now is the time to take that twice repeated four bar intro and keep repeating it for however long it takes him to finish. It's about knowing tonight's the last night of a tour and it's just the right time to repeat the chorus that extra few times, to extend the solo - which, on a normal night, would be pretentious and turn the crowd off.

It's about the guitarist having a bad day, feuding with the singer, whatever, and playing aggressively and capturing the audience in the tension of the moment and that dynamic.

It's all those things and so much more. Even if you have a robot that simulates human perfection/imperfection brilliantly, it doesn't express how it's feeling, it doesn't adapt to how the gig's going, it just plays the same things (with whatever generated imperfection) every night - or, potentially, improvises without any awareness of how the rest of the gig is going.

Program a robot and, sure, you can fake the technical aspects. But music's about having a "soul". Soul is all those aspects mentioned above and more - it's far more than just perfection or imperfection.

Give me the choice: A guitarist who can play Ywingie under the table, technically and it terms of number of notes played, or B.B. playing two or three perfectly expressive notes per bar and I'll take B.B. every time.

Vai

[krueger71]

Yeah, I'm sure Steve Vai is trembling in fear over these news...

Not so fast...

[voss, sometimes...]

I would like to point out a couple of things, why this thing won't be able to play like a human being.

1. Crazy J can't bend
2. Crazy J can't slide
3. Crazy J can't palm-mute

I would like to add one more thing: if you listen to the demo songs, Lola is not played by the Crazy J itself, but you can hear an electric guitar in the back.

BUT, from engineering point of view, I do have to give credit though :)

Re:Days are numbered?

[mmkkbb]

(giving up mod points AGAIN today)

Did you miss that whole punk thing in the 70s?

Re:Days are numbered?

[The Wooden Badger]

I think that the point is that the guitarists that get air time are hacks. You and all your sibling posts mentioned guitarists that are almost universally unknown, except to other guitarists/guitar fans. Many times you may never hear about a great guitarist unless by word of mouth. The radio stations around here will maybe play a SRV song once in a while. I never hear anything like Petrucci, Satriani, Vai, Eric Johnson, or a dozen other guitar gods. Most radio stations seem to think that something like Green Day or Nirvana is a tour de force of guitar virtuosity.