Since this is a reply to an older post: reminder, we were talking about guitar to MIDI converters.
I have been thinking about trying to use this recently, and have just done a few tests using a DAW (Reaper). Comparing the guitar waveform and the MIDI output at millisecond resolution.
Seems as if the latency varies from about 28 ms on the bottom string to 15 on the top.
May be just about usable for some things, perhaps with a bit of post-record tweaking?
But of course the proof is in the playing…
I’m about to try using it on a real project: will report on the experience in a while…
Fender hired Seth Lover, the fellow who designed the PAT 57 Humbucker for Gibson, to make a Humbucker for Fender. They put them on a model of Telecasters. That WR pickup looks like one.
It is interesting that all the products listed there are at least 10 years old; in most cases closer to 20.
The concept of guitar synths or controllers seems to have distinctly fallen out of favour?
At least, I am not aware of any recent ones… Migic, which I’m playing around with, is itself at least 5 years old and doesn’t seem to have had any development done on it in several years.
I’m a little surprised that the Variax models didn’t add MIDI output: they obviously had to have pitch detection for the modeling. Of course even those are out of production now…
Picked up the Firebrid today. Already replaced two strings, so I can report on this:
Getting a new string into them and locked in is a pain. The B tuner also had a broken piece of string in it that made getting that one locked in an extra big pain until I found that piece of string and removed it. After that, they’re amazing and stay in tune really well. No more going out of tune because I laid the guitar down on the bed, but definitely a guitar you don’t want to replace a string on in the middle of a show. So, bring a backup guitar.
The neck is actually pretty thin, but It’s not 60s SG slim taper thin. Thinner than most Les Pauls I’ve touched, but in that ballpark. It’s lots thinner than my SJG’s 50s tribute neck.
Oh, and guys, don’t top wrap your strings around a stop tailpiece in a tune-o-matic setup. It doesn’t do anything but add a MM or so of length to the strings between the stop tailpiece and the bridge, if that. Oh, it also makes the strings harder to remove and replace.
Not very successful, I’m afraid. That latency is still a bit too much to allow for natural expressive playing. A pity… it’s almost there, but not quite good enough.
I just noticed that Jam Origin is supposed to be bringing out a product shortly (Midi guitar 3).
I’ll be watching that with interest!
Of course the problem is just basic physics: any processor needs to acquire a non-trivial fraction of a waveform in order to accurately infer the pitch. And since the frequency of the bottom E on a guitar is about 80 Hz, a full cycle is 12.5 Msec. Probably very difficult to get latency any lower than that even in principle…
Update on Migic. It is marginally useful for certain things. I just used it to record an acoustic bass track for a current project. It feels more intuitive to play a bass line on strings rather than a keyboard, and I was able to get the whole thing down in one take.
Mind you, this was a simple bass line without bends or rapid runs.
I don’t think Migic works well for any kind of rapid or complicated lead instrument line.
One thing to note: it won’t track properly on the bottom octave of a bass guitar.
I had to play the part on a 6-string. However it does have the ability to transpose the output MIDI by an arbitrary number of semitones.
Eh well. Tried this on another project with a more complicated line, and… it just doesn’t track well enough.
I have really tried to use it carefully, adjusting my playing to try to be very precise and avoid any ghost notes from hitting accidental strings etc… and trying to tune the settings…
But it’s still not good enough. Sorry.
MIDI guitar is not usable yet. If ever?
Looking for a way for me and my brother to play together online. He is in NYC, I am in VA, we both have 400+ internet. We looked into this briefly a couple of years ago, tried JamKazam if I recall correcctly. Only tried one night and there was a delay between the sounds from our guitars
That is very helpful. I got a B rating on my laptop, wi-fi, with an ethernet connection on my desktop I think it will be fine.
Let’s assume we get the best setup possible. Can we really play together in real time as if we were in the same room? I don’t mean 100% perfectly, there will be problems, dropouts, delays, can we just play along together like we can talk together on Zoom.
I can tell you from experience: unless you have some kind of state-of-the-art wi-fi, even if you were in the same room the latency/jitter will be unacceptable. You want a wired connection. However, maybe you have better wi-fi than I do; you can always test it.
If you get SoundJack set up and the settings tweaked, you will indeed be able to hear each other and play together. SonoBus is another software worth trying out for this purpose.
I haven’t tried this, but I’m sure DPRK is correct. I have been playing around with guitar-to-MIDI converters recently, and even as little as 20ms latency is enough to really throw you off.
And you’re almost certainly going to get substantially more than that over any TCP/IP connection.
The problem is not TCP/IP, it’s specifically wi-fi. Sending the same sound/MIDI over a network cable to a (close-by) computer takes a fraction of a millisecond but can take a few milliseconds over wi-fi, and that problem is doubled if the person at the other end is also using wireless. Maybe maybe maybe you have excellent wi-fi, but you need to test that and it’s one more link in the chain that can potentially go wrong.
A propos, a reminder that your sound card/driver settings can also be a source of latency; point is to test everything works and try to optimise well before the real jam takes place.
Well, it’s really a combination of things. WiFi is not as fast as a wired connection, of couse.
But just doing a ‘ping’ over WiFi to my home router I’m seeing a round trip time of less than 1 ms.
But the OP is trying to interwork between NYC and VA. Once packets go out on to the internet, I’m seeing ping times of at least 20ms even to geographically close locations.
And as you say, there are additional sources of latency from sound cards and drivers.
Of course professional live sound operators are using ethernet cables to carry multiple channels of audio nowadays. But that would be a dedicated point-to-point connection with no routers involved.
Current range limit on “live jamming” is ~650 miles, max - due to the speed of light through fiber optic cables—using Wifi vs. a hard-wired connection is immaterial, since both have to hit that infrastructure downstream. I’ve had some interesting conversations at the last two NAMMs with some companies working in this space, due to competitive overlap (I’m not working with real-time, however).
JamKazam (and the recently defunct ElkLive) have been able to get it about as low as it can go. However 20ms round-trip latency is unplayable for rhythm players, who NEED precision. For reference, 10ms of delay is where “chorus” starts to occur. Also, IIRC, those are audio-only streams; once you introduce video at a useful resolution and framerate you need more bandwidth, etc.
Even using a high-speed, multichannel protocol like @xtenkfarpl referenced (Dante is the current industry standard but there are others) you aren’t going to beat the geographical limit.
That may be just a bit pessimistic: speed of light delay over 650 miles is about 3.5 ms.
But of course there are many other factors. Signals through fiber optics don’t travel at light speed, more like 0.6 c I believe. Also the internet is a packet-switched system and each router introduces some unavoidable latency. Furthermore the routing is not deterministic, so subsequent packets may take different paths from one endpoint to another, which may cause ‘jitter’.
And then of course there are the local latencies from A to D and D to A converters in the audio interfaces.
It’s clear that real-time jamming is a pretty difficult problem, even with top-of-the line equipment.
May be just possible under limited circumstances (and of course you wouldn’t want to try to stream video at the same time)!
I admit I haven’t tried JamKazam or similar: has anyone else here?
I have been doing collaborative recording work with a couple of musician friends, but we work by having a common basic backing track and shipping overdubs back and forth to import into our respective DAWs.
I’ve been wanting a short-scale bass and I decided it was time. Fender has a $150 off special and Sweetwater has a 10% off special you can add on. I would prefer to play a guitar before I buy, but I’m not real close to a place that sells guitars, and I had a good experience with another SW guitar purchase. Hopefully that is true again.
Now the waiting begins. insert fingers tapping gif here
Are you exclusively a bass player? I have a Fender acoustic bass, as well as an acoustic six string and an electric.
The bass is a really interesting challenge in comparison to the six strings but I love noodling with all three.
The fret distances are a bit of a stretch (literally) and the low E string is comparatively fat enough that its roundness is really noticeable and something I have to be cognizant of; it’s definitely an additional dimension or consideration when playing.
