[Harp-L] Re: Be the horn section



Robert Hale wrote:
<Years ago I read about a device that simulated the "blip" waveform of the tone from a trumpet, and <was planned for use on guitars. Now that we have these marvelous Voice harmonizers, how cool would <it be, to BE THE HORN SECTION with a harp?
<
<At the time I tried a vocal harmonizer, it tracked very well for vocals, and not so tight on harp <tones. Richard, have you spotted anything doing this really well?
<I'm speaking of the pieces designed for guitar and vocalist, where the guitar input defines the <chord and the harmonizer creates matching 3-part harmony for the vocal input...where we would use <the harmonica instead. In the case where we are not the guitar player, too, we would arrange for a <splitter to give us the guitar signal into our harmony processor.

In general, pitch shifters vary in terms of their ability to 1) track pitches up and down the harp, 2) respond quickly to the input (i.e. without noticeable lag), and 3) produce a shifted pitch without digital artifacts, also known as "aliasing".  I think the digitech pitch shifters do a good job of all this, though I occasionally get some artifacts with extreme shifts, such as a 2-octave down shift, for example.  But the Digitech RPs will only produce one shifted note at a time, so are not tops for a full horn section sound, though they work pretty well for emulating a single saxophone.  (That's sax--another reed instrument.  It's harder to emulate a trumpet.)

Being a horn section requires more than one shifted pitch, and it also requires differences in timbres in each shifted voice to simulate the different timbres of horns in a section.  You can get more than one shifted pitch by using multiple mono-pitch shifters (e.g. two Digitech RPs) or a vocal harmonizer (like one of the digitech vocal boxes, a TC Helicon VoiceLive) or a dedicated multi-pitch shifter like the Electro Harmonix HOG or POG. But none of these will change the timbres of the shifted pitches individually; you hear this clearly in Wade Schuman's work with Hazmat Modine, where his POG produces a big organ-y sound, not a horn section sound.  It's the difference between one instrument/player playing multiple notes and a bunch of instruments/players playing one note each.

There's one more issue along these lines: in a real horn section, the players don't all play every note at the same time, nor with the same exact pitch.  The small differences in timing and pitch can be heard by the audience as the sound of a section of players.  With pitch shifters and harmonizers, you don't get that--all the harmonized notes have the same timing, attack, and pitch characteristics, and so they're perceived as one sound from one player, not a section.    

In short, there's a difference between playing harmonized chordal lines, which is one of the things a horn section does, and sounding like a horn section.  If I had unlimited space onstage (plus time to set up and tear down), I would run three RPs in parallel, each with a slightly different delay line on it simulate the different timing of multiple players, and each running different pitch-shifted intervals along with different amp and EQ models to make the individual timbres stand out.

Short of that, I'd consider a keyboard or guitar synth to do the horn section stuff. Or I'd accept the limitations of a vocal harmonizer or pitch shifter--it might not sound just like a horn section, but it does have an interesting sound of its own.

Regards, Richard Hunter

author, "Jazz Harp" 
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