[pdntspa]

> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience

Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.

Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.

[Nition]

They're talking about electronic instruments there. The comment is about how electronic instruments don't generally match the physical expressiveness of acoustic instruments (like the Cello).

[solomonb]

I'm talking about electronic instruments how they are deficient in expressiveness compared to your cello example.

> Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects.

The story is not quite so simple. Your synthesizer is going to have a buffered output so it wont have the complex impedance loading interactions with the amplifier as the guitar pickup.

This is actually critical to how early distortion effects such as the classic Fuzzface work and imo is essential for the kind of complex timbres you can produce with a guitar + tube amp.

In fact you can take an electric guitar, put a buffer pedal in the chain between your fuzz pedal and amp and completely destroy the ability to produce wild feedback and distortion.

[vegadw]

So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again?

I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups.

The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.

[dec0dedab0de]

they're comparing an electric guitar to electronic instruments, like midi keyboards. An electric cello would be the same thing as an electric guitar in this context.

[fuzzfactor]

>the tube amp and the guitar are seperable

Eminently separable, but it's good to be aware of the tradeoffs.

Not magic at all, physics.

It's good to understand that high-impedance is not the biggest deal, but one thing about the magnetic pickups that not everybody realizes is the way that plugging directly into a tube (pre)amp basically magnetically couples the strings to the grid of the input tube.

And that grid has no further physical connection to any other components in the circuit, not even within the same tube, except for clouds of electrons and the flow that occurs among the electrodes.

That way your music basically starts out being sprayed through space directly from the strings which create the magnetic signal.

The thing about high-impedance is the way the relatively minuscule resistor values between the amp's input jack and the input grid's tube pin are so insignificant by comparison to the pickup internal impedance, that resistance might as well be zero.

The only reason there is a resistor in between the input jack and the input grid anyway is to accommodate a high-impedance input with better stability under wider conditions than otherwise.

Now you can get a righteous sound with any number of pedals in between the guitar & amp, especially if the battery power is used to boost the signal to more than the guitar puts out magnetically, and it's been the mainstream for so long people almost never consider doing it any other way.

It's just not the same magnetic coupling from the strings to the tube, you can't have both unless it's a tube pedal.

I've designed lots of solid state circuits too and there is plenty of excellence when coupling the same magnetic pickup directly to a silicon or germanium crystal lattice and going from there. Whether it's pedals or a pure solid-state amp. Instead of using any tubes at all.

Also some people prefer having tubes only for the audio output section, coupled to the magnetic speakers through the antique-style audio output transformer the old-fashioned way.