The Role of Computers in Prog

... a man in a skirt. 

Biko by Peter Gabriel. When I saw it performed live, a group of bagpipers proceeded down the aisles of the auditorium.

Great moment.

Well, duh. That's the point. 

Robert Fripp. ;-)

Also. The hypocrisy is that Keith Emerson, sitting in front of a Moog Modular, is "prog". If he plays on a VST Moog, by the argument, it's no longer prog....... and if he plays on a non analogue synth, let's say a Nord, that's not prog, either. ;-)

Good question. I suspect it is partly because a guitar is not a perfect instrument. Before I expand on that...

...another pointless anecdote:

Years ago I bought a Yamaha Portasound keyboard, these used FM synthesis and sounded great. While I was show my new toy to a friend of mine (who was an excellent piano player and a good guitarist) I pointed out that disappointingly the "guitar" preset didn't sound much like a guitar, and demonstrated that by playing a few bars of Life On Mars, "See" I said, "it sounds like a keyboard". He smiled and said, "that's because you are playing it like one". He took the keyboard from me and played it. Low and behold it sounded a hell of a lot more guitar-like when he played it, not exactly like a guitar, but enough to make me hear that the guitar preset was indeed a guitar sound.

...anyway. A guitar is not a perfect instrument...what do I mean by that? Unlike a concert violinist in an orchestra, a guitarist is not trying to make his guitar sound exactly like every other guitar. While the violinist strives to play the perfect ideal note, the guitarist has no truck with that. A sampled "perfect" guitar note played on a midi-keyboard will be perfect every time, guitars aren't like that because that's not how guitarists play them. As you observed, a sampled acoustic guitar is better, not much, but better and that's partly due to our expectations of how an acoustic guitar should be played and how it should sound, with each note approaching the perfect ideal note.

In my earlier pointless anecdote I explained that I modelled a guitar using 6 modules, one for each string, but there was more to it than that. A guitar is, as we know, polyphonic so it can play more than one note at once, even when playing with a plectrum picking single notes one at a time the sound is polyphonic with each string adding to the total sound. However, each string is monophonic - if I play a C on one string and then an E on another I will get a chord but if I play the C on one string and then an E on the same string I do not. This is a very obvious thing when you read it, it isn't quite so obvious when you play it on a polyphonic keyboard or computer score. When a guitarist solos he uses all strings with some notes still ringing out as the next is played on a different string and some not if they are on the same string, this is something that is quite difficult (or perhaps even impossible) on a keyboard. But on the computer score you can do this quite easily so I programmed my six guitar modules to be monophonic and carefully chose which note to put on which "string", deciding which notes I wanted to harmonise and which I didn't.