LV2 Pitch Tracker

[gimmeapill]

Greetings everyone.

While toying a bit with the newest Ardour, I found with great surprise that the GxTuner from Guitarix included midi out functionality that could be used to play a synth.
However performance of the pitch tracker is not so good to be really useful as a guitar synth midi converter, even for single notes. latency is still very high and pitch bends don't really work.

Did anybody achieve good guitar synth results with Ardour without using a dedicated midi converter like the ones from Roland?
https://www.roland.com/global/products/gk-3/
https://www.roland.com/us/products/gr-55/

Cheers,

LX

[English Guy]

I do not know about performance but aubio tools include pitch to midi. It needs to be launched from a command line then connected to via jack

Edit: sorry, weeks later I saw that autocorrupt had changed aubio tools to audio tools

[gimmeapill]

Thanks English Guy,

Actually no need to investigate further, the question has been well discussed already:
https://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=11561

So it looks like the guitar synth thing can still not be done on the cheap. And even expensive solutions have still quite a few caveats.
Too bad, I wanted to play guitar with a TB303 sound while controlling cutoff with attack

Let's check again in 2-3 years...

[tavasti]

Did anybody achieve good guitar synth results with Ardour without using a dedicated midi converter like the ones from Roland?
https://www.roland.com/global/products/gk-3/
https://www.roland.com/us/products/gr-55/

I have Roland GR-33 (+ gk-3), and for quick tests, I think it is does not have much lag.
How ever, haven't tried to connect it to external midi device / computer.

[gimmeapill]

I have Roland GR-33 (+ gk-3), and for quick tests, I think it is does not have much lag.
How ever, haven't tried to connect it to external midi device / computer.

Thanks & good to know this thing actually works.
The computer part for sure requires very low latency (both audio and midi). On my system with ~7ms measured round trip latency and no audible lag when playing synths through midi controllers, the Guitarix tuner as pitch tracker gave something like 30-40 ms lag.
I think it is more meant to trigger actions via special notes like pattern change etc.. than playing live.

So a dedicated pickup/pitch tracker system like the gk-3 would still be the way to go, but I'm not going to invest - that was more curiosity than a real need.

Found that thing also, which looks way more fun than a regular keyboard midi controller:
https://www.thomann.de/gb/you_rock_guitar_yrg_gen2.htm

http://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/ins ... ock-guitar

[tavasti]

Found that thing also, which looks way more fun than a regular keyboard midi controller:
https://www.thomann.de/gb/you_rock_guitar_yrg_gen2.htm

I have that too, but there is some strangeness how to play it. Playing it is not 1:1 with guitar:

1) Strings have very long sustain, but if you have fretted some string, taking finger from last string will mute all strings, even those which were playing open
2) Fretting playing string will give really strong hammer-on, so at least for my self I get one 'strum' on putting finger on string (unintended, badly timed) and another when strumming for real.
3) There is no way to silence one string except fretting and unfretting it, and fretting makes that hammer-on.

These make playing different from guitar, so in sense of playing, it's different instrument. There might be some fixes / adjustments for that for recent firmware, but didn't have time to check that yet. FW was behing registration, and registration did have some bad setup on sending confirmation mail, so it did not arrive to me...

And haven't tried it as midi controller yet, played with it's own sounds.

[gimmeapill]

It looks like you've fully explored the area - thanks again for the feedback
Ok, so nothing really worth investing for me at this stage, I'll stick with a keyboard controller, that will be less trouble.

Cheers,

LX

[tavasti]

It looks like you've fully explored the area - thanks again for the feedback
Ok, so nothing really worth investing for me at this stage, I'll stick with a keyboard controller, that will be less trouble.

Those Roland GK-3 + some Roland Guitarsynth to interface are working solutions. My primary reason for getting one is to get some background synth for guitar, so that there is no need to create 'backing track' separately, just take your guitar and play. It works fine also for playing synth only with guitar. Got mine second hand for decent price, new ones are bit pricey for my taste / budget.

[tramp]

Thanks English Guy,

Actually no need to investigate further, the question has been well discussed already:
https://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=11561

So it looks like the guitar synth thing can still not be done on the cheap. And even expensive solutions have still quite a few caveats.
Too bad, I wanted to play guitar with a TB303 sound while controlling cutoff with attack

Let's check again in 2-3 years...

There is a project from geraldmwangi on github:
https://github.com/geraldmwangi/GuitarSynth-DPF

Haven't play with it much, but you may wont to check it out.

[tavasti]

Found that thing also, which looks way more fun than a regular keyboard midi controller:
https://www.thomann.de/gb/you_rock_guitar_yrg_gen2.htm

I have that too, but there is some strangeness how to play it. Playing it is not 1:1 with guitar:

1) Strings have very long sustain, but if you have fretted some string, taking finger from last string will mute all strings, even those which were playing open
2) Fretting playing string will give really strong hammer-on, so at least for my self I get one 'strum' on putting finger on string (unintended, badly timed) and another when strumming for real.
3) There is no way to silence one string except fretting and unfretting it, and fretting makes that hammer-on.

These make playing different from guitar, so in sense of playing, it's different instrument. There might be some fixes / adjustments for that for recent firmware, but didn't have time to check that yet.

Ok, now I got manual for that YouRockGuitar. There is settings for addressing these problems, so it looks like it is possible to make it behave more like guitar.

Right now I turned Hamme-on off, and Auto-silence (which silences all strings) off, but lets see if there is some more fine tuning in parameters. There is more hammer-on related parameters which could be used.

Edit: might be that YRG is dead product, so only second hand available?