If you’d like more detail & options, this page is for you. Read on below to see which options fit your needs.
To implement any of these options, simply go to the Guitar Vibrator album within Spotify, Apple Music, or your favourite streaming service, then choose the track you’d like to use and set it to repeat. For most people, look for this icon in the player:
Advanced Vibration Options
There are currently two variables for you to choose from: capo positions and harmonics content. Look back for more options in the coming months.
Capo Positions
Imagine that you’ve just vibrated your guitar for a week and are amazed to hear its new sound. Wonderful!
…but then you play any note other than an open string (a frequency that wasn’t vibrated for a week) and hear its old dull sound. Doh!
So, how to vibrate more pitches?
My quick solution is to pop on a capo and vibrate it again, up a semi-tone. And then again, on capo 2, 3, and 4. After these five rounds of vibrating, all of a guitar’s pitches will be covered by fundamental and/or overtone frequencies. It might take awhile, but if someone really wants to vibrate a guitar, this is how to do it.
To find these sound files, just look in the album’s track titles. “Capo 0” is open position, “Capo 1” up one fret, and so on.
Harmonics Content
Time and experimentation may provide clear answers, but for now it’s a mystery how best to vibrate a guitar. Or more specifically, YOUR guitar. Different guitars may need different sound sources, or different players may want to vibrate their guitar toward a different outcome. Regardless, there are currently three Guitar Vibrator options to choose from:
- Many Overtones
- Some Overtones
- Few Overtones
I suspect that “Many Overtones” theoretically maximizes the vibration effect, while “Few Overtones” minimizes the unbelievably annoying ambient noise, thereby maximizing the chance that you’ll actually completely vibrate your guitar. “Some Overtones” is a halfway point.
As you’d expect, the more overtones are present in the sound source, the more the upper harmonics of your guitar will vibrate, possibly “opening up” those frequencies more than if just the lower harmonics are vibrated. So if you’re looking to brighten up your sound, using “Many overtones” might be the ticket. In contrast, if you think a guitar only needs the fundamental buzzed, choose “Few overtones”. “Some overtones” is a middle-ground.
Or, perhaps you have an all-mahogany or all-koa acoustic and you really want to reinforce its fundamental-focused sound. Then choose “Few Overtones.” Or, if you want to try making it sound like you swapped a spruce top onto your plywood starter dreadnaught, see how far “Many Overtones” will take you.
Read more about the Sound Sources if you’re interested. Very briefly, the current set of available sounds all use sawtooth waves from an analog synthesizer with varying amounts of low-pass filtering. Sawtooth waves have all of the harmonics within the harmonic series, so there’s a lot of harmonics energy present. The filtering removes different amounts of the upper frequencies, lowering the intensity.
My assumption is that “Many Overtones” is the best option, but your guess may vary. To manage the ambient noise in your household, “Few Overtones” is definitely the best.
If you play with these options on your guitars and find interesting results, I’d be glad to hear about it.
More About the Sound Sources
To get fully nerdy about this, go to the Sound Sources page.
Very briefly, you’ll notice that all of the sound sources available in Guitar Vibrator Volume I have a somewhat smeared tuning. Instead of pure pitches on an A=440 Equal Temperament scale, there is a slowly oscillating smush of sound. This is done on purpose, aiming to get the guitar’s wood fully vibrated on the precise pitches AND on the frequencies a little above & below “perfection”. I’m sure your guitar has never gone out of tune mid-set, but I assure you mine has.
Coming Soon…
Look back in the coming months for options like:
- zero overtones
- pure tuning
- different sound sources
- more bright ideas TBA once these first ideas have all been tried!