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I picked up an Oberheim Strummer at Goodwill for $10 some years ago, and had never actually hooked it up before now.
http://www.keyboardmuseum.org/ar/o/ober/str.html
I just dug out a power supply for it and it's pretty fucking cool! It's main purpose is to allow a performer to combine the lame appearance and lack of sex appeal of a stage keyboardist with the convincing strumming sound of someone who can actually sort-of play guitar. When you play a chord into the strummer on a MIDI keyboard, instead of playing all the notes simultaneously, it feeds them out in a strumming pattern, complete with velocity (volume) changes, etc., to make it sound like an actual strum. The trippy part is that it actually sounds pretty damn good! I haven't changed anything off the default settings, but when I hook up the MIDI output to Garage Band and choose the Steel String Guitar, it sounds quite realistic. I'm not sure if I'll ever actually use this for stage performance, but it certainly allows me to do some thing with a basic MIDI setup that I couldn't do before. I recall looking for a manual online before and having little success getting one for free, but maybe I can fiddle with the settings myself and figure some of them out. As you can see from the link above, it seems to have a lot of features I'm not seeing right now.
http://www.keyboardmuseum.org/ar/o/ober/str.html
I just dug out a power supply for it and it's pretty fucking cool! It's main purpose is to allow a performer to combine the lame appearance and lack of sex appeal of a stage keyboardist with the convincing strumming sound of someone who can actually sort-of play guitar. When you play a chord into the strummer on a MIDI keyboard, instead of playing all the notes simultaneously, it feeds them out in a strumming pattern, complete with velocity (volume) changes, etc., to make it sound like an actual strum. The trippy part is that it actually sounds pretty damn good! I haven't changed anything off the default settings, but when I hook up the MIDI output to Garage Band and choose the Steel String Guitar, it sounds quite realistic. I'm not sure if I'll ever actually use this for stage performance, but it certainly allows me to do some thing with a basic MIDI setup that I couldn't do before. I recall looking for a manual online before and having little success getting one for free, but maybe I can fiddle with the settings myself and figure some of them out. As you can see from the link above, it seems to have a lot of features I'm not seeing right now.
