Guitar To MIDI

Quad Cortex Feature Requests
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MIDI GUITAR 2 converts a regular guitar signal into polyphonic MIDI with low latency and great tracking. It runs well on an iPad Air 2 (2014), so it’s not CPU hungry. It uses a neural net, so it’s aesthetically a perfect fit for a Neural DSP device. Having this available as a block in the Quad Cortex would be a huge win in marketing for the QC. No other modeler has anything like it. I’d gladly pay an extra $100 just to have this block, to cover any licensing fees.

For those unfamiliar with what this means, it would allow you to use the Quad Cortext to control synthesizers and samplers. Wanna play strings, or piano, or sax, or a ripping synth lead with your guitar? This would let you do that.

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I might be wrong, but… iPad Air 2 (2014) uses Apple A8X chip which is 5 years newer than QC’s processor and probably runs circles around QC. I haven’t really researched the QC yet, but it looks like QuadCortex uses CPU weaker than ‘Amazon Fire TV 4k Stick’ — a flash-drive size device I bought on Amazon Day for 25$.

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Guitar Midi on the QC would be fantastic! I believe there is a feature request for vst support, if that ever comes to fruition we would be able to see if there;s enough processing power to run Guitar Midi.

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@Muse that’s a good point, yes the processors in the QC are detailed here:

It has a good amount of DSP horsepower but the ARM CPUs are not exactly recent or super powerful, the Arm Cortex 5 CPU was meant for lower power lower demand processing than other Cortex processors. The Apple A8X CPU is 3x faster clocked, has several cores vs 1 ARM core on each SoC in the QC, and an integrated GPU. I think the ARM cores in the QC have to drive the screen using some other offboard chip and it lacks a GPU or advanced graphics in the SoC.

:smiley:

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Yes!! I would love to see this feature as well. I am trying to find the best solution for using Midi Guitar 2 with an iPhone through the Quad Cortex USB. Any help setting this up is greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Jim

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Was seeing the crespo/douglas interview regarding the sonth block. I think it would be awesome to have it at least monophonic (they alteady have monophonic pitch detection for the synth :slight_smile: ).

Time to reawaken this request and maybe tgey ll see it :).

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Wow, impressive! Even more impressive is the guy in the 2nd vid was able to use that Steinberger Spirit’s whammy and stay in tune. :rofl: I’ve tried a few different guitar synths over the years, last one being a Boss GR55. I never could get the tracking right for anything fast or complex. Maybe my playing is just too sloppy. :person_facepalming: Latency was always a frustration for any sample-based sounds. I havent tried any of the newer units that use the standard (non-hexaphonic) guitar signal. Anyway, this looks interesting but needing to carry a laptop would be a deal-breaker for me, for live use. Concerning adding this tech to the QC, I wouldn’t expect the demand to be high enough for NDSP to incorporate it. Who knows? It’s certainly worth the feature request. Thanks for the show n tell.

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I’ve been using an iPad in my live rig for a couple years now. My main usage is SWAM sax/trumpet for certain horn leads, and various synth patches.

I run it in an effects loop, routing clean guitar into then straight out of the modeler outputs. No further processing in my Kemper/QC. It’s straight-pass through. If I want effects on the synths and stuff, I can add it via the iPad.

I use an iRig interface. The main consideration is bus powered or external powered. If I’m just fucking around, I use an iRig HD, which is powered off the USB port: no need for external power, but you can’t charge the iPad at the same time. It also has a replaceable chord.

For the stage, I use an iRig I/O which has a power adapter that will charge the iPad. However, this thing has the shittiest cable ever made. The end literally falls off, and you can’t use any off-the-shelf replacement. I’ve had them break at multiple gigs, just by being jostled. They charge $30 for a replacement. It’s a fucking racket. I ended up buying a stack of TC Helicon Go (Behringer’s clone) to have backups.

For software, it’s about AUM, which is a slick, deeply configurable iOS AU3 host. Hosting GUITAR 2 MIDI is necessary to reduce the buffer size (and thus latency), something G2M doesn’t support natively. I use two instances of GUITAR 2 MIDI, one set to monophonic and one set to polyphonic. My switching is configured to enable the correct one for the virtual instrument I want to play. You bypass instruments that aren’t in use, and they use no CPU.

I control the whole thing with a Blueboard, a tiny, wireless Bluetooth MIDI pedal with 4 buttons. It gets about a year on 4 AA batteries. I wrote a script in Mosaic, a programmable MIDI manipulation tool, also hosted in AUM, which lets me get 8 buttons out of my Blueboard: 4 patches on a single click, and 4 more patches on a double-click. This also gives me a visual of what patch I have selected.

I have two expression pedals on stage with my guitar rig. One of them uses a Y cable so that one expression pedal controls both my guitar rig (wah) and my synth rig (saxophone expression, synth cutoff, etc.)

AUM
AUM4625×1055 362 KB

AUM-Mozaic
AUM-Mozaic1352×1014 131 KB

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GUITAR 2 MIDI is fantastic. Latency is very low. You can detect it, but it’s low enough that it feels good to play. It’s neural net based. Fishman Tripleplay is about 1ms faster (also neural net, but with a hex pickup) and is better at polyphonic tracking, but I never used it because it’s extremely annoying in a host of other ways. GUITAR 2 MIDI FTW.

Yes, clean tracking does require good technique, but so does sounding good in general, so it’s actually quite good practice.

Here’s a video I made for my bandmates when I first got it (using my Behringer FCB10101 as a controller): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am-c0sRI7EE

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