Pr3Va1L Posted May 28, 2005 Report Share Posted May 28, 2005 wouldn't it be cool to build a MIDI only guitar... i'm thinking around this: à - A midi pickup bridge (or a little pickup attached on it... Roland prolly) - A sustainiac single coil sustainer that would be totally cool to do... It could make (example...) some really nice violin sounds and such!! anyays, just throwing around ideas... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sambo Posted May 28, 2005 Report Share Posted May 28, 2005 Only problem is, you need a pickup to drive the sustainer, Dunno if you can drive itself with the Plus version (the one with the pickup in it) or not?! Otherwise that's a cool idea! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
psw Posted May 28, 2005 Report Share Posted May 28, 2005 No...you do need a different pickup to the driver on sustainer systems. You might (though I've never heard of it actually being done and I had no luck) be able to use the output from undersaddle piezo outputs like on graph techs ghost system, which also has midi capabilities. You'd still need a pickup looking driver though up near the neck...so you would'nt get that totally clean look like the variax for instance. psw Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sashimimi Posted May 29, 2005 Report Share Posted May 29, 2005 I only have one question, why would you want to do this when you could just buy a midi keyboard? Not to critisize, i guess it makes sense because you can already plaay the guitar, and not the keyboard though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lovekraft Posted May 29, 2005 Report Share Posted May 29, 2005 I only have one question, why would you want to do this when you could just buy a midi keyboard?Think about it - I play keyboards at best fair to middlin' (mostly cheesy rock piano and a litle Hammond), , but I can't play them nearly as well as I play guitar. All the nuances and ornamentation, not to mention vibrato and string bending, are second nature on guitar, but they don't translate to keyboards without a lot of extra effort. Why else does Bela Fleck play a MIDI banjo? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sashimimi Posted May 29, 2005 Report Share Posted May 29, 2005 Point well taken, I guess it does make sense since its in the muscle memory and all. Also I did not knw that Blea Flek played a midi banjo, that is realy realy cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tirapop Posted May 29, 2005 Report Share Posted May 29, 2005 Is a sustainer really necessary with MIDI? You're using the guitar as a trigger for a tone generator. It seems like you could get more control and options if the sustain was all digital. Maybe put a little joystick on the front of the guitar to control "feedback" effects. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pr3Va1L Posted May 30, 2005 Author Report Share Posted May 30, 2005 all the midi pickup does is get the string vibration and send it to a machine that changes the sound to another really... so it's not the same thing why not play keyboard? as you said, i can't play as well the piano as i can with guitar, and also the "feeling" is very different... can you bend and do vibrato and stuff with a keyboard? no... synth guitarists are very rare but it's really nice! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tirapop Posted May 30, 2005 Report Share Posted May 30, 2005 can you bend and do vibrato and stuff with a keyboard? no... You haven't looked at too many keyboards, have you? Yes, you can bend notes on a keyboard. They have a thing called a pitch wheel. all the midi pickup does is get the string vibration and send it to a machine that changes the sound to another really... so it's not the same thing MIDI is Musical Instrument Digitial Interface. A MIDI guitar (or a guitar run through a MIDI converter) just sends out a string of commands like "turn this note on", "turn this note off", "do this programmed command", etc. Any MIDI device: a guitar, a flute, a keyboard can drive the same MIDI device (a synthesizer, a sequencer, etc). That's kind of the whole point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
monkey69962000 Posted May 30, 2005 Report Share Posted May 30, 2005 instead of bending the strings on sustained mode, you can take a bending pot from a keyboard to do the MIDI bending. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lovekraft Posted May 30, 2005 Report Share Posted May 30, 2005 Yes, you can bend notes on a keyboard. Yes, but you're still missing the point - there are maybe 15 keyboard players in the entire world who can actually duplicate the sound of a guitar string bend and reproduce a guitar-like vibrato (Jan Hammer springs to mind). Besides, I'd be willing to bet that most of us aren't world-class keyboard players, so what's the point of having to develop a new skillset simply to replicate (inadequately, IMO) techniques we already have? All MIDI does (in a best-case scenario, at any rate) is translate the pitch and volume changes in an input signal into a digital stream capable of controlling other tone generators - expression and nuance should still be a product of the player's technique. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tirapop Posted May 31, 2005 Report Share Posted May 31, 2005 LK, I wasn't making the case for replacing bending notes at the strings with doing it on a pitch wheel. I was just trying to correct Pr3Va1L's misconceptions about keyboards. The point I was trying to make is that it would make more sense on a MIDI only guitar to play with sustain digitally, rather than putting in all the hardware for a sustainer. I'd guess if you ran real feedback through a MIDI pickup, the complex overtones would make it harder for the MIDI converter to follow the pitch. Whatever comes out (which I assume is monophonic for each string) still has to go through a tone generator. I wouldn't expect it to be as satisfying as the real thing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pr3Va1L Posted May 31, 2005 Author Report Share Posted May 31, 2005 err... i know these pitch wheels exist...But they're really aweful. what you're telling me is sustainers aren't useful since you can generate sustain (even without MIDI) the reason sustainers exist is because those don't sound natural. Poeple have said e- bows sound good with MIDI so why not a sustainer ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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