UNPLANNED DOWNTIME: 12th Oct 23:45
What’s the current state of real-time guitar to MIDI?
What's Hot
From time to time I enjoy messing around with soft synths in Reason (a DAW). I’ve got a little MIDI controller keyboard, but I’d really like to control synths with my guitar.
Reason has a very useful feature where I can record guitar audio and then convert it offline to MIDI - which works well for programming monophonic parts. It doesn’t allow for real-time playing of soft synths though.
Does guitar to MIDI still require those big bolt-on Roland G2K pickups, or have things moved on a bit? Is there a box I can plug into that will take my regular pickup output and convert it to MIDI in real time? That would be ace, especially if it worked polyphonically.
0 LOL 0 Wow! 0 Wisdom · Share on Twitter
Comments
Reaper has Reapitch ( or is it Reatune ? ) which detects pitch, and allows pitch to midi conversion, works ok for monophonic lines, but I came across a plugin called MidiGuitar 2, which does the same thing polyphonically, and allows all sorts of VST style instruments to be played via a guitar signal.
Midigutar 2 cost around $79, when I paid for the licence, it works as a stand alone application, as well as a VST plugin in a DAW, and I have had a fair bit of use out of it. The licence includes a bass version too, but last time I looked it hadn't been updated in a while.
Latency is just about bearable, and there will be inevitable clean up required, but it is useable for simple lines, and is good for expanding ideas.
It is still valid to use the Carlos Alomar approach of six high E strings and program the pitch offsets into a GM-70.
if I was controlling real synths, the Sonuus box would be ideal, though.
https://www.jamorigin.com/
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
Me: https://www.jamesrichmond.com
Auto-Bounce by Tom Salta
Dreamhost Web Hosting
Might explore plugins
At least in a daw you can quantise the notes to tempo/drums
You can quantise recorded MIDI in GB, and after doing so it sounded OK. The vague plan was to record kick and snare in one pass, and then go back and add hats, toms, cymbals etc in separate passes as well. It basically worked OK, and would work better if I map the drum trigger notes to more playable combinations.
Best/fastest tracking: Fishman TriplePlay
That's only my personal opinion, of course, so YMMV.
Over the years, I have had pretty much every hardware/software guitar synthesizer or pitch to MIDI product and, apart from the two listed above, I only kept a BOSS GP-10 for guitar/synth modelling and my beloved analogue GR-300.
Feedback thread: https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/3575378
I have no problems with short ideas, and provided you map out the instrument, drums would be fine.
I'd rather use any old guitar in standard tuning to get something going, than have a dedicated MIDI guitar, with six high e strings to use, via a midi pickup.
That's just me though, I have a session set up in Reaper that will record a DI, a midi and a VST instrument at the same time, for the times when that is what I want to do--which isn't often.
It's fun when it works though.