Lots of people are having a tough time trying to sort out all the new digital products that have arrived. Some of the guitar purists out there are adamant about their old gear with the tube amps and the late '50's instruments and have no interest in updating their gear. Well, let's just look at a little history.
During the late '60's and early '70's, one of the main problems for bands was stage volume, usually from the guitars. We had to turn the amps all the way up to overdrive them and get the sustain we needed. My bands played a lot of clubs, frats, and concerts. If they told you to turn it down, best do it. Transistor, or solid state amps, never had a good sound. They were too clean and didn't break up well. We were flooded with all kinds of fuzz pedals and distortion boxes, all transistorized gadgets to try to get past this volume problem. Mostly they sounded thin and artificial.Then somebody, probably Paul Rivera, figured out a way to intercept the final gain stage and put in a Master Volume control so we could overdrive the preamp and turn down the overall volume. This was good!!
OK, so we got off to a bad start with solid state electronics.
About 1982, I was playing at a products show in Nashville when I saw a guy playing his guitar through headphones. I wandered over and saw that the headphones were plugged in to a little blue box not an amp or console. He handed me the guitar and headphones What I heard was one of the greatest sounds ever!! This was the Rockman by Tom Scholtz and I paid $280 for it on the spot. I still have it and still use it. Thanks to better op-amps, solid state was catching up in quality.
The first synth guitar I played belonged to Bob Welch from Fleetwood Mac. It was one of the first released by Roland and we were both really excited by the sound, but there was this terrible delay in response. Mostly we thought of it as a gimmick but some of the orchestral sounds were somewhat useful in the studio, you just had to sort of calculate the delayed response!!!
What helped digital most was the demand for midi gear. The improvments were coming almost daily to the world of synthesizers and the keyboard players were having all of the fun!! Digital drums were introduced and soon they were being heard on records. Sadly, this didn't result in better guitar synths. Many companies were experimenting with various designs, but the Roland Corp. was becoming the leader in guitar synths. They were successfully addressing the problem of A/D conversion times. The industry standard was to get faster than 5 msecs to escape the delayed response problem.Their GK-2 pickup coupled with their sound modules was quickly becoming more than a gimmick.
With the onslaught of computers came digital
recording and the digital format of CDs and floppy disks. Once
again, the purists were lined up against it and at first, rightfully
so. Sampling rates of 20k were quickly boosted to 42k, then 44k
and some at 48k. These faster rates plotted sound waves more
exactly and we overcame the initial problems of bad cymbal sounds
and thin bass lines. The flood gates were open and now we are
doing 24 track recording at home in digital studios that cost
as little as $25,000. I am amazed at the quality of the recent
guitar effects processors. I'm using the Digitech 2120 and the
Line 6 POD for most of my work and I run directly into the console
and on to ADATs by Alesis. I've discovered that trying to record
with pedals and an amp sounds great in the room, but on playback
the sound can be unpredictable. I'd much rather use the digital
effects because it plays back exactly as it was recorded.