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Dec 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Jeff Obee

           
 

KEYFAX Guitar Grooves (Mac/Win) Keyfax Software's Guitar Grooves ($39.95 in Standard MIDI File format on floppy disk; $49.95 for SMFs and WAV and AIFF files on CD) is a tidy little product aimed primarily at songwriters and producers. It offers strums, picked runs, jazz comping, and more in a variety of styles, tempos, and keys.

Basics The guitar parts were performed by J. J. Belle, who has played with Elton John, Madonna, the Pet Shop Boys, and many other big names. He used an Axon MIDI guitar controller, one of the best MIDI guitar controllers on the market. It translates every nuance of Belle's guitar playing-the slight bends in pitch, vibrato, slides, and so on-beautifully.

Guitar Grooves is intended for General MIDI users, but it is viable with any guitar samples. Control Change data such as Program Changes is written into each file and will automatically call up the appropriate patches on your GM/GS/XG synth. Each file comes with a setup track containing the GM data, a drum groove on track 2, and the guitar files in track 3 onward. Each guitar phrase is two bars long (except for the "Skank" parts, which are four bars each). The Axon MIDI guitar controller can send MIDI data on each of the six strings; Keyfax recommends using six MIDI channels for most of the files to capture all of the nuances of a real guitar. However, you can assign a full part to one MIDI channel and still achieve excellent results.

Real World I don't own a GM-specific module, so I was unable to ascertain how the CC data works with that type of synth. However, my past experience with Keyfax products assures me that you'll have no problems there. Instead, I used the GM bank on a Kurzweil K2000RS and Sweetwater's Ultimate Guitars samples, and found that certain issues arise when using these tracks with non-GM synths. For instance, you'd need to load whatever drum and guitar sounds you have, assign them to the correct MIDI channel manually, and delete the unnecessary Program Change data or mute the setup track. You could also edit the Program Change data in your sequencer and tweak your synth or sampler to call up the GM patches. Jus t be aware that drums must be GM-mapped to play back correctly.

I had to transpose all the guitar parts up; this may not be required when using a GM module. In general, the parts sounded good when transposed from about five semitones to an octave up, making it easy to adjust to the key of a given song. Tempos are designated in the file name, but there is no information specifying any keys or meters (all grooves are in 4/4); I would like to see the documentation go a bit further here. It can be a painstaking process to fit a part into a tune after the fact, making Guitar Grooves best used as the foundation of a song.

Verdict Guitar Grooves can be a worthwhile songwriting tool and a good resource for getting authentic guitar parts into your music. It won't cover a wide range of songwriting situations, and in all fairness, it's not intended to-in fact, Keyfax described it to me as "a night in J. J.'s living room." It most definitely warrants a listen.

Overall EM Rating (1 through 5): 3

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