Thinking about this from an electronic engineer’s perspective, I wonder how the variax guitars keep the latency low enough? As I understand it, the note information is picked up by piezo transducers in the bridge. But then this has to be converted to digital form, then run through some probably quite complex DSP processing to do the modeling, then converted back to analog to provide the output signal.
That’s one problem they don’t have, I think, since there are individual piezos for each string?
There have been a couple of true MIDI controllers for guitar, but none of them have caught on. Future Man, best known for his work with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, plays a SynthAxe, but as the Wiki article notes, fewer than 100 of them were ever made. SynthAxe - Wikipedia
As noted above, the standard approach involves some fairly complex analog to digital conversion.
Things like the synthaxe get round the note identification problem by detecting the electrical contact between the string and the fret, I think.
I suspect the playing technique feels very different from a regular guitar, though.
If I’m going to use what amounts to a quite different instrument, I’d work on brushing up my keyboard skills instead…
I just heard back from The Twelfth Fret, an outstanding Toronto guitar shop. They’re not dealing in Variax or Godin instruments at present.
I’m hoping to hit Long & McQuade sometime next week, and talk to them about what they might have. I may just be better off capo-ing the electric, and getting used to the strange feel up the neck…
Sorry to steer away from this MIDI guitar/Variax discussion, but I got a proper bass amp and it is so nice to not worry about blowing up my guitar amp/speaker. I can put a drive pedal in front and start getting some fuzz that would definitely harm the guitar amp (or hit the passive circuit on my G&L bass). It’s a very mundane Fender Rumble 500, but it sounds so great compared to my Blackstar guitar amp I’ve been playing through. Can’t wait to bring it to our next band practice!
And, it weighs nearly nothing! Beyond my desktop Yamaha amp, this is the lightest amp I’ve ever owned including my “small” 15W tube guitar amp. Much lighter than the Fender Super Twin 95lb monstrosity I used to carry up and down stairs.
Band practice today got cancelled so I didn’t get to wow the guys with my sick tones! I am disappointed though since I’ve spent a lot of time learning all the new songs. Having a proper bass amp has been inspiring!
I have played around with this a bit. The latency seems rather better than I remember with the Casio guitar I used to have. To the point where it is - marginally - useful for certain things. Though still perceptible.
Same limitation though: it is strictly monophonic, so a rather specialized tool.
Apparently some time ago they were talking about a polyphonic version, but it seems nothing ever came of that…
Do you have to tweak your audio driver settings (buffer size, period, …) to minimize any extra latency due to software?
Then there is, including in those pre-built boxes, a tradeoff between latency and being able to accurately detect low frequencies. Seems like there is room there for some “creative” algorithms. Same for polyphonic music. NB there is some pretty old code eg here
but latency there is really, really bad if your goal is real-time analysis. On modern hardware and using novel techniques it may be possible to do somewhat better.
I’m on Windows, using an ASIO driver for the audio interface.
I more or less did the buffer optimisation when I installed the DAW (Reaper, by the way).
I haven’t done any additional tweaking specific to the Migic plugin.
Mind you, all I’ve done with it so far is play around a bit; I haven’t tried to use it seriously on an actual project yet. As and when I do, I expect I’ll report experiences to the audience here.
I’m still lurking around. I was a drunk asshole in the past, got liver disease, defeated that devil on my shoulder and then I got HNCC cancer from smoking. I’ve had Reynaud’s in my fretting hand in my middle finger that’s really complicated playing as it’s swollen to half again its normal size so it mutes strings when I make chord shapes by accident as its difficult to pin the string perpindicularly, so to speak, so it lays on it.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to make time to play, I’ve accumulated some gear, but I’m just not very good. This is about the best I’ve managed so far (I’ve lost a lot of weight too):
I’m OKish with guitar, and maybe a step above OKish with bass, but I’m having a great time playing with a couple guitarists. We have dreams of playing live if we can find a drummer (a singer would be great too).
I am disappointed though since I’ve spent a lot of time learning all the new songs. Having a proper bass amp has been inspiring!