I totally agree with your assessment that the computer has become a cool "instrument" in music. I love the video and photos of Dan Snaith (aka Manitoba, aka Caribou) performing here on the CBC. The glow of the monitor in his eyes as he mixes up some songs and sets the stage is magical.

Also, I think that the assumption that a guitar is cool simply because it resembles guitar-ness is totally fallacious. As a guitar collector yourself, you probably feel that there is some aesthetic value in the shape and features of the guitar, but only in relation to the sounds they produce.

Tacking a keyboard or video display on a guitar body is to destroy that relationship between form and sound.

I think there's a similar aesthetic value in computers now too. There is an intimate relationship between the form of the computer (internally perhaps more than externally) and the content of the music. Whether or not the music is innovative, well, that depends on the artist.

What kind of guitars do you own? A Gibson es-355 was my wet-dream as a teenager. I nearly relinquished my university money to buy one.

Yes, precisely -- what I'm objecting to here is the idea that the form of the guitar is something that is "better" than the form of the computer. That point about the glow of the screen on the face of an onstage performer is exactly what I'm talking about; as musical instruments, computers have a really lovely and sexy vibe all on their own.

Most of guitars are actually fairly cheap and unexceptional; since I'm not a professional musician, I've never been able to justify blowing tons of money on instruments, with the exception of a special-edition Simon and Patrick acoustic I got back in the early 90s when I was playing in a folk-rock band. The others include a Danelectro U2 and an Epiphone Special.

I own a very strange Stratocaster: for $60, I bought a used Bullet -- the cheapest, crappiest guitar made by Fender, which weighs about one pound and seems to be made of reconstituted popsicle sticks. Then to teach myself a bit of guitar electronics, I installed a set of Rio Grande pickups, which, amazingly, make the thing sound like an insanely overpriced Strat, heh. I'm doing the same now thing with an Ibanez Artcore: Inexpensive body, but I'm going to shove a couple of custom-made weird old waxy humbuckers that sound like a Rickenbacker/Gretsch blend.

I have a very strange old Guild S60-D, which was made sometime between 1977 and 1981, and was my first guitar ever. The 24-fret neck is very useful for speed metal, which was, ah, an important genre for me back then. And I've also got an unbelievably crappy old used Chicago-brand 5-string banjo I got last fall.

Perhaps most excitingly, my artist friend El Rey is in the process of painting a guitar for me as an art piece! Again, it's a super-cheap body -- an Epiphone Les Paul Junior -- outfitted with a Seymour Duncan Dimebucker pick-up, designed for "crushing, metal massacre" tone, heh. I'll keep the artistic design a secret, but when it's done I'll be blogging about it, with pictures.

Though I don't play guitar or program videos, there is another aspect to this that bothers me, and that is that the user interface does not seem to match the use at all. Just as in driving a car, the steering wheel and petals work well to control the car, while a voice interface or a keyboard input would be a terrible way to drive around a crowded city. Here, it seems that you would always be holding the thing up in front of you face trying to read the screen. A computer would seem to be a much better interface for this.

I have to disagree with you on the cool factor -- keytars are the acme of nerd-cool! And I wouldn't say that the Viditar "betrays an insecurity" about performing while seated, rather it's a step in the evolution of computers from one form (the desktop) -- to many. Input devices that free visual performers to use their whole body, as guitarists do, are a wonderful liberation from the 2D, binary frame of mouse and keyboard. I say this, by the way, as a guitarist and visualist, who glories in input devices: mice, trackballs, Wacom tablets, MIDI keyboards, Firewire cameras and anything else that lets me interact more deeply with my computer.

I quite agree that it's good to have fresh options for computer control outside of typical the keyboard-mouse -- not least because new interfaces allow for creative new ways to use tools, software, etc.!

The problem with the Viditar isn't that it's a non-keyboard/mouse controller; it's that it tries to latch onto the cool factor of a guitar by assuming its shape. It's almost painful to look it.

You make a good argument that the keytar has transcended this and become, in fact, an emblem of nerd rock! But I actually think its inherent ungainliness undermines its ironic appeal, ripping open another wormhole in the fabric of musical space-time, and depositing it back to the point from whence it came: As a uniquely embarassing instrument. Or another way of putting it: At first it was just incredibly loserish; then it was so very loserish that it became cool; but the irony has, like a cheap drug, burned off, and it resides once again in the very outposts of loserdom.

To quine further, the problem with the Viditar isn't that it's a computer, nor that it's shaped like a guitar; the problem is that it isn't *really* shaped like a guitar - you don't use guitar skills to play it.

I'm just happy that you can stand up with it. At most every place I've performed, I'm presented with a table at chair height so I can't stand up while I work. Perhaps when the big VJ bucks start rolling in I can have a high table rider in my contract. Cough.

You and JohnT make a good point that guitar skills aren't used to play it; however, I still can't condemn the form factor without trying it out. If Livid does a NYC demo, I'll try it out and blog about it.

Incidentally, my friend Geoff uses a MIDI guitar to play breakcore, using software he wrote himself. He doesn't use the analog output at all, i.e., the sound of the guitar, just the digitized MIDI signals.

http://gdam.ffem.org/~geoff/schedule.html

I saw this on Tech TV and bought the record for the band that uses this - synch. I also did see it on the Hot News site by apple http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2002/11/sinch/ seems like more a conceptual art piece than a musical instrument, i think it works!!!

Dan, good point about the incredibly lame accomodations afforded to onstage computers. Has anyone started making portable, collapsable computer desks specifically for live performance?

...Cigarette-girl trays? Probably not.

I can't remember if Pat Cadigan covered the physical interface in, e.g., _Synners_ ("First you see video; then you eat video; then you be video" [sic?]). I suspect she was clever enough to treat it as an invisible ubiquity.

It's funny that the wearable-computing cyborgs are offering plenty of solutions that creep almost everyone else out by being too unfamiliar, unlike the 'viditar', which is too familiar. Actually, I expect that audiences will get used to the viditar pretty quickly if the player can use the real screens instead of the little one on the instrument; exactly unlike big-screen presenters who have to learn to face the audience and use the laptop screen instead of looking over their shoulder at the screen everyone else is looking at.

Heh -- good point in the aesthetics here, wearables vs. Viditar.