MIDI Guitar and Loving IT

[Davis Webb]

The Godin Freeway SA alone, is a great guitar. I picked one up last year along with a GR55 guitar synth.

The Godin is amazing and I had not given it its due. I was using it just for MIDI and not much of that, preferring to play the strat, tele or whatever.

But wow, the Godin Freeway has incredible tone. The neck is really heavy sounding...great humbucker. The mid has a Strat CC tone and the bridge is quite the other lead humbucker. Its a weird pickup array but it works.

When play,t whats impressive how huge a difference you get in tone depending on where you pick. Its there on my strat too, but not quite as pronounced.

The neck on the Godin is the type they dont make any more on other brands, tight and thin. Very comfortable and easy to generate new melodic lines, versatile. And it looks great.

Then there is re discovering MIDI guitar. Maybe its the passage of time, but now I can really phrase like the origianl instrument. With my looper I can lay down a piano vamp....or just play the guitar soiund...then ...BOOM...you are off. Viola, sax, fretless bass, GR300, theramin sounds, trumpet....choir, cello.....it really opens up your playing. New melodies emerge, new inspiration around every bend.

I dont know why more people don't play the GR55 with the Godin synth pickeup. It takes some practice, at first you blow it. But with patience, wow.

Anyone else here playing MIDI guitar> or have great Godin stories?

Godin is the little engine that could.

[FrankHudson]

I've been playing MIDI guitar off and on for a few decades. My first was a the Casio toy with the rubber fretboard which I bought when the unsold stock was liquidated. Given the low cost and toy nature I mostly fooled around with the MIDI functionality.

I moved on to a Roland system around the turn of the century and upgraded a few years back to the G55 module. I keep the Roland pickup on a DeArmond S72 (Fender's ill-fated attempt to revive the Guild electric guitar line with a Korean made line, many of which are quite good instruments). I mostly used the sounds in the matching module, including the sitar emulation as well as the usual synth sounds. I found it great fun to pull up a synth lead sound and using the spit output (MIDI to PA, guitar pickup to guitar amp) make like John Mclaughlin and Jan Hammer playing unison lines. Make like=minus that level of talent

Currently I have a need to realize some more complex arrangements of my music with instruments I don't own or know how to play. For that I have moved to a Fishman Triple-Play wireless MIDI interface which I keep on a cheap electric guitar which then plays virtual instrument in Apple's Logic Pro X software. I don't really play keyboards, but I tend to use them anyway for keyboard instruments, but for bowed strings and many "ethnic/world" string instruments I often use the guitar MIDI for input.

Your post already points out one of the challenges: phrasing like the real instrument. Clean playing is important too. You can be guitaristic for some synth patches, but for many virtual instruments your subtle vibrato and pick attack variations will sound terrible. I go up a gauge in string size and use coated Elixir strings on my MIDI guitars to reduce string noise a bit, and someday I'll have to try flats.

A full-flesh finger picker who knows how to use their right hand bare flesh to mute strings would have an advantage as a MIDI guitarist I'd think. I'm not that person however. I sometimes cheat with one of those shredder "hair band" like string wraps to muffle unfretted strings somewhat.


So, what kind of music are you playing via your MIDI guitar?

[AcouStickistNS]

Years back I had a VG-99 with the three position MIDI pickup attached to my guitar. After a few months I did not enjoy it much and eventually sold it off. But before I did, I ran my friend's Godin classical through it. Worked way better than the Roland/Boss pickup and had more controls already in the guitar that offered more fine tuning.

All that extra gear threw the balance of my PRS off and just became unbearable for me.

The California Guitar Trio does some amazing things with acoustic guitars with MIDI, and I know a few others that use them, but it's just not my cup of tea. But if something new comes along and I want to try it again, I'm getting a Godin to do it. Attaching extra items on normal guitars just really annoyed me - but Godin has everything you pretty much need to go MIDI and you don't even realize it's there.

With effects like the SY300, I'm curious if current MIDI guitars will go extinct in the near future.

[Davis Webb]

Hi

I am playing mostly progressive fusion jazz on it. I have a looper and DR Rhythm drum machine which has built in bass lines.

I lay down some drums and bass with a long passage on something like the acoustic piano or the guitar, some chord progressions, mabye 3-4 minutes of it..then I grab different voices like alto sax, GR300, violin, glass cello, choir, effects and solo over that.

This way I explore new melodies all the time. A sax suggests a melody that we dont really hear on guitar. Same with something like a sine wave for soloing...it takes me to new places. So easy listening jazz fusion is probably most of it.

That having been said i play japanese scales, byzantine scales, ragas..on various instruments like the Oboe.

Really expansive. And then of course the doubling effect of trumpet section and guitar....

[Bob Womack]

I picked up a Roland GLK-3/GK-20 combo a while back. I have the pickup mounted on a '94 Carvin TL-60T "tele-ish."




I have been using it for various things in the studio. For instance, whenever I need a Hammond B-3 for gravy I can supply the sound from the Roland. I use it quite often in scoring, supplying pads, drones, and effects. The lag bothers me a bit. Is that a function of the pickup or the synth?



Does anyone know whether the GR-55 synth has less lag than the GR- 20?

My article about the synth is HERE.


Bob

[EdEd]

I still have my Casio PG-380.... yes Casio, but not a toy at all.

Ed

[paulp1960]

Originally Posted by EdEd

I still have my Casio PG-380.... yes Casio, but not a toy at all.

Ed

I had a Casio MG-510, a black HSS strat type guitar with built in hex pickup and the electronics to convert guitar to midi.

It was pretty good and not a bad electric guitar either.

These days I'm trying the Jam Origin Midi Guitar 2 software plugin.
It does polyphonic midi with just a normal guitar input but it's a bit too glitchy for me to enjoy using it. It's supposed to work best with humbucker pickups but I've only got single coil guitars at present.

[Davis Webb]

Not much lag with the GR55. Depends on what you need. If you want to do fast Malmsteem solos, yeh.

But for reasonable fast runs, Lee Ritenour type stuff, just fine.

[Gordon Currie]

I started messing around with guitar synth in 1992. Roland GR-50, Hohner Steinberger copy with a GK-2 pickup.

After a number of years, I found that at best, I could emulate a good keyboard synth player, but a great player could play rings around me. So it was relegated to being a writing tool.

I keep thinking about putting a synth pickup on one of my better electrics, and picking it up again. Like some posters, I expect I might find it is a lot more fun than I remembered.

[Davis Webb]

Hi Gordon

The GR55 in the hands of someone who plays cleanly, can take you further than the older gear. Its not as fluid as playing a regular electric. And of course, a keyboard player is going to out perform MIDI guitar.

But, for most playing it works fine once you set up the sensitivities. The GR55 forum in the virtual guitar forums is good.

For eg..i set the sensitivity to like 25, instead of the recommended way. That eliminates tons of glitches. A bunch of other tricks like that.

What it will do is make you play differently. You wont make the same melodies,, it will open up new melodic thinking. That is huge.

[EdEd]

Originally Posted by paulp1960

I had a Casio MG-510, a black HSS strat type guitar with built in hex pickup and the electronics to convert guitar to midi.

It was pretty good and not a bad electric guitar either.

The thing with the PG was that the midi out was parallel to the internal synth engine. The signal went straight to the synth engine. The tracking was much better than the other midi guitars of the day. With Roland (and Shadow and RMC), it had to go thru analog to midi conversion, and then the midi synth played. The tracking suffered due to the (minor but present) lag. The PG wasn’t perfect, and as others have stated, a keyboard could play circles around it, but for specific parts, it could be very useful.

Ed

[Hurricane Ramon]

I'm using a Roland GR33 guitar synth module .


I have a Godin LGXSA that is serious bizz , its got SH-l & SH ll Seymour Duncan PU's . It's three voice are cool from
electric to acoustic elec. to midi . I've had this set up since the mid 1990's , about 13/14 years .


It's got split coil taps to get the " Strat " sound as well as humbucker . The T.C.H. Voice Live 3 X has [ BodyRez ] X5
presets for the taming of piezo quack on the acoustic electric side .




Since getting a T.C.Helicon Voice Live 3 X the combined MFX it has for guitar ( vocoder ) does it for me , I'm in hog heaven .


The tracking on the GR33 is as good as the GR55 and it has a few things that the GR55 hasn't , like a real 5 midi in/out to
begin with . The FX on the Roland GR33 are stellar they along with the VL3X FX are a real formidable wall of sound .

EZ :

HR

[DukeX]

I don't play MIDI guitar, but I had a Godin LG-P90 for over a decade, and it was a superb guitar. I'm sorry I let it go.