Making your guitar sound like other instruments

[chumpito]

Since I've seen similar questions about how to do this for specific instruments I thought I'd start a general thread.

So far I've seen.

For church bell sounds - ring modulator.
For elec. piano sounds - hammer-on-playing, reverse filter, tremelo, reverb.
For sitar - pipe cleaner, chains, tinfoil, or metal beads on strings.
For sitar - Jawari
For violin - delay->reverb->high-gain overdrive
For violin - high-gain overdrive->Flanger

Anybody got something they want to add?

[stm]

Many years ago I came to a reasonable violin sound by accident.  I was using a distortion unit and added a reverse tape simulator.  This sounded very violin-like.

A quick way to try it out is to use some overdrive or distortion unit, and pick the strings with the guitar volume all way down, then raise it in obout half second.  Of course the reverse tape simulator will do this automatically for you every time you pick.

Also, as far as I know, some older synthesizers used a ramp wave as the basis for violing and cello sounds.  A ramp wave is not the same as a triangle wave.  Ramp waves climb at a certain rate and when reach the top thay fall down suddenly.  They have plenty of odd-ordered harmonics.  I don't know of a circuit that can easily generate a ramp waveform starting from a guitar input.  On the other hand, squarewaves and triangle waves are easy to get.  Try with these and see what you can get.

[jsleep]

Check out the book Guitar F/X Cookbook by Chris Amelar.  An entire book devoted to making your guitar sound like something else.  Great recipe for a Hammond B3 in there and very convincing steel drums sound by sliding a heavy pick between the strings down by the bridge.  Book comes with Demo CD, great stuff

JD Sleep

[chumpito]

Check out the book Guitar F/X Cookbook by Chris Amelar.  An entire book devoted to making your guitar sound like something else.  Great recipe for a Hammond B3 in there and very convincing steel drums sound by sliding a heavy pick between the strings down by the bridge.  Book comes with Demo CD, great stuff

JD Sleep

Book is on it's way!

[travissk]

That covers a lot of the "prepared guitar" approaches, and I hadn't heard of a couple (thanks!).

The only things I can add are:
-You can use a Slow Gear type effect for some synthy string sounds.
-EH Micro Synth, Line 6 FM-4, Boss GT synth patches, etc.
-Some pitch shifters seem to alter the tone a little bit... perhaps running a guitar>strong compressor>octave-up might get you some weird sounds.
-You can use a pitch to midi box or Roland Pickup and get just about any sound . I used the open-source version of Max/MSP called "pd" and had my guitar outputting midi (albeit with a slight delay) as part of a homework assignment.