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what is the best midi guitar system in 2020 ?
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06-10-2020 09:40 AM
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I dunno - I had a Roland guitar synth about 25 years ago that used the GK style pickup which I installed on a strat. It worked pretty well. But I am super curious about the Boss SY-300. No special pickup required. There’s a demo at Sweetwater web site that makes it look crazy good at tracking. I downloaded user manual. The string sensitivity can be optimized for your playing. Not sure how much tweaking is required to get the performance seen in the demo. Anyone here checked these out? There’s a compact foot pedal version, much less flexible but still sounds great, but no midi out.
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If you are wanting to play midi plug ins or instruments, then Midi Guitar by Jam Origin is the best I've found and a good price. Fishman's Triple Play is about the same in responsiveness and playability but requires a pickup which limits you to just the guitar (s) you've installed the pickup (s) on.
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here's a demo I did of the sy300. Tracking is vastly superior to anything else I've ever tried. I gave up on jam origin because with my 77 exrubato and flatwounds, it was terrible at tracking. It does better with rounds and lighter guages.
Originally Posted by lukmanohnz
The problem with the sy300 is that it doesn't have enough internal voices and so it doesn't work well with chords.
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What about new
Boss SY-1000 Guitar Synthesizer ?
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I had heard it had the same amount of internal voices as the SY300 so I suspect for me, it would not be a good tool. I think the primary thing they did was to add the 13pin connector to it so you could drive it with their pickup system. I've never been impressed with their pickup but there's a local guy who's very influenced by holdsworth and he has no problems with tracking with his roland pickup going into the GR-55
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That was fun to listen to. Thank you posting that. Amazing how far the tracking technology has progressed. Also - pretty sure you played more notes in that demo than I played with my old Roland synth in the entire time I owned it... Nice shredding! Originally Posted by jzucker
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Midi Guitar by Jam Origin is quite good...I,ve tested it few days.
I use actualy Boss GP-10 with midi guitar/Framework/ also.
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Its performance is mediocre at best, particularly with .014 - .050 flatwounds. The boss is significantly better in tracking. Guitar jam midi has noticable lag and many false notes. ZERO lag and false notes with the SY300.
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SY 300 it can not be a midi controler....I think.
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That's not the point. The point is that it tracks amazingly well. The SY-1000 does implement the midi out using the same technology so I assume it's going to be superior to fishman or guitar jam. Guitar jam midi is really poor. You can see that when you try to use it into your daw. I think Melodyne produces better results honestly
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Boss GP-10 works quite good with DAW.
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Not for notation.
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I figured I would chime in...
I was playing MIDI guitar in the late 80's, and again in the mid - late 90's.
Had and played many of them: Roland GRs, Ibanez, Yamaha, Axon, etc.
The Axon was the fastest / most accurate...
Andras Szalay apparently has brought the Axon tech to the Fishman Triple Play, but I am unsure. I will try and verify with Andras.
The Axon, way back when, apparently was using some AI, artificial intelligence, and all the talk in 2020 is AI….
So we all know it takes so many cycles of a string oscillation to determine its pitch, and that translates into so many milliseconds (ms).
We humans can hear latency at anything over say 5 milliseconds. We even see this latency issue in our digital audio interfaces, and why Thunderbolt / USB 4 can solve this latency once and for all.
The Axon, would capture the players playing and create a mapping of notes (frets) played, and keep a "cache".
I would think every note (fret) has a certain waveform signature, and the Axon can compare the played notes signature to the note signatures in the cache and not have to reanalyze the string note again and again.
A cache is much faster, just like a web browser cache.
Now that was late 1990’s, and computer processors are exponentially faster in 2020, 20 years later, as I would think so are software programming techniques.
I am also hearing that MIDI Guitar 2, while is incredibly powerful and accurate at converting pitch to midi, still cannot analyze / execute more than 3 note chords.
As a guitarist who is doing chords all the time, 4 notes jazz voicings, that would not be good.
Hopefully MG2 can solve this dilemma. Would be interesting to know if the developers of MG2 know if this polyphony limitation can be solved with more processing power, more cores, maybe using GPU's, or maybe with faster / better software coding techniques: Apple's Swift per say...
So for me I will have to go with the Fishman Triple Play, to get 4, 5, and 6 note voicings.
For single lines, Midi Guitar 2 is impressive, more than just passable, but legit.
Check out LoFiLeif's YouTube.
He has proven to me that with something like the MG2, guitar as a MIDI controller can actually happen on a very pro level and live performance.
I remember when using my Axon years ago, I had to do much tweaking per sound, like turning bending, glissandos, etc off for most patches: pianos, strings, pads, etc.
Now guitar as a MIDI controller is at a major disadvantage, in that a keyboard has an instantaneous connection, no latency at all.
A guitar string "has to be analyzed" and “converted", and that is the issue…
I remember back in 80's two guitar midi controllers. One was an early Roland and the metal frets served as conductors / contacts, and there was wiring and electronics in the neck. No string analysis as I understand it.
The second was the "toy" Casio with rubber frets and plastic strings, tracked fast internal, with MIDI, I never tried it, but any latency was not due to ascertaining the pitch. Little spring levers in the bridge would move in and out when a note was fretted.
I also am not sure this guitar MIDI controller thing will ever get solved.
It could easily probably, but only if there is money to be made will it ever get solved.
A $100 plugin is cheaper than a $300 pickup, or $1-$3K guitar.
I am hoping the MG2 software plugin approach can solve the chordal / polyphony limitation of 3, and I am curious as to why that is a problem. As an Apple systems engineer I have an interest in that...
I mean apparently IBM's Watson can hear / analyze say a Mozart symphony and score every single note of every instrument / voice in real time, all parts.
That is say an 80 piece orchestra mostly one voice (monophonic) composed of brass, winds, strings, percussion timbre of tones.
Watson can perform exponential amount of calculations per second, and all us guitarist are looking for are 6 guitar strings, and most of the time, finger-style / polyphonic wise, 3-4 voices at one time....
As an example, the Sony PS4, and new PS5, game box, can perform trillions of calculations per second in its GPU (over the billions per second) in a traditional CPU….
Maybe it's time MG2 or Fishman Triple Play or anyone out there start thinking about GPU to solve this....if it is indeed only a matter of processing power.
But I am still thinking, 3 voices at one time, and we need 4 to get by, 5-6 ideally. We can't be far off..... I'll have to ask Andras, if this is the case or not...
Thx, John K
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Hi Kris,
After using MIDI guitar for many years I was curious about the Jam Origin plugin as everyone was saying it was amazing. In the end I tested it side by side with my Axon Ax 100 II hardware unit. The full video is here: To summarise though, the plugin is amazingly sensitive to dynamics and articulation but for me didn't have enough control to filter out unwanted note-triggerings. It also performed less than perfect with chords. The Axon was great with chords and could be better customised to one's playing style. It also had lower latency so for me it just about edged it.
Cheers!
Neil
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