Musician Forum - Band Discussion Board - BandMix

Only caution I can give you is using a stereo PA in live situations. The stereo "sweet spot" is typically small, so the majority of the audienne only hears one side of the sound.

Well, yeah, if you have the cabs real close to each other than you widen the sweet spot at the cost of 'stereo' - at a certain point its all coming from one direction and you can't hear any stereo effects.
Putting the cabs on opposite walls doesn't change anything - the only sweet spots are equidistant from both speakers. Move in any other direction and one is louder than the other. Bass is different as it tends to be heard as 'omnidirectional' - you can't really identify the source, which is why single subwoofers are used with many systems.
Even the big bands that used stereo PA systems back in the day (Pink Floyd, Led Zep - Song Remans the Same Tour) kept most everything panned to the center, and only used the wide stereo for certain parts/effects.

Because I play keyboards too, I never "got" the reasoning behind guitar synths - the early models tracked terribly, but they've come a long way.
Fishman makes a wireless MIDI pickup that you can add to any guitar. $400. From it, you can control your virtual synth software - or drive an external synth module. Roland's pedal/pickup package is about $800 now, but Boss has one for half the price. I haven't heard what it can do.
Back in the mid 80s I picked up a monophonic Korg synth that had a Cv input section set up to use guitar input, but the tracking was totally useless (of course).

jookeyman wrote: I can't tell you how many times I saw guys plug into the Roland pedal board they had on display and started playing blues licks. I'd rather listen to chalk screech across a blackboard. If you play through a horn patch, you have to think 'I'm a horn player' and play accordingly. Same goes for the other patches as well. I wish I was a competent transcriber because I would love to transcribe the bass line on 44 Jookeyman for horns. When I played that song I was thinking 'horns' not bass. You basically (no pun intended, again) have to think that way when you play synth guitar.

when i'm holding mallets in hand and not standing behind a vibraphone or marimba....my midi controller is a malletKAT. and you summed it up perfectly. when playing ________ lines, that's how you must think. even down to range of the instrument. it's bad enough when someone is trying to cop a vibes deal on a keyboard but can you at least stay within the actual range of a vibraphone???!??!?