Thank you for a very comprehensive post!
On Jan 17, 2009, at 12:00 AM, William Brohinsky wrote:
Maybe someone has done this and has a practical and effective way of
doing it.
Well, that is what I'm wondering.
First off, I admit that most of my experience with midi and
non-traditional (read: not piano-keyboard-like) controllers fell
between 1980 and 2000,
Yeah, me too, but probably a lot less experience than you (only two
different guitar controllers) and only in the 80s.
didn't result in nearly so good an improvement to our
performances as it detracted from it, due to extra concerns with
cabling, adjustments, and random failures of equipment.
That sounds familiar.
The biggest problems with MIDI converters is that they are, in
essence, only good for one-note-at-a-time, and are therefore easily
confused by...well,... just about everything.
(There is only one case where
prescience _has_ been designed successfully into hardware. I did it,
and it won't work for this application.)
Could you elaborate?
-get an acoustic guitar which has been designed for use with a midi
converter. Generally, this involves a special bridge with piezeo
pickups built into it, and may involve additional damping to reduce
body noise or interaction between strings. They function best when
each string can be detected separately by it's individual pickup. This
also works for electrics with hex pickups, but again, in either case,
it is hard to make a pickup that "gets it" with a plucked string.
I just sold my ancient Roland GM-70 and GK-1, but I figure that midi
guitar technology must have come a long ways since then. I have a
friend who used to play one-man band here and he always used a midi
rig (Roland GR-09). It seemed to work very well.
I thought he used a nylon strung guitar, but now that I look at some
pictures it looks like a steel strung. I know however, that there are
nylon strung midi controllers out there because I tried one at a
trade show once many years ago and it worked well.
Anyway, there are piezo pickups intended for
aftermarket installation on guitars, and they require a very good
luthier to be done right and not look bad afterwards. They might be
adapted to lute... but at a cost, because lute strings don't pass over
a bridge (unless they're like the beast I had to play last semester),
and few people want to add the weight of extra stone and copper to a
lute.
This is the route I am thinking about. On acoustic guitars these
systems are invisible these days. So the question is whether one
could be adopted for lute. I think the biggest problem is the spacing
of the bridge. Guitar bridges are much closer to a standard size. Now
if the hex pickup was actually in 6 parts and could be placed under
the bridge on the inside of the instrument centered on each course,
there might be a hope of this working and that is what I was
wondering if anyone had tried.
As for midi-converting from a lute which is not being muted viciously,
it's going to take some amazing processing from an adaptive high-speed
processor to do a bad job of it. Doing a good job of it is still a few
decades of technology ahead of us. The interaction between the strings
in a unison pair alone can drive a detector nuts.
This is probably very true. I wonder how the state of the art these
days can deal with these problems.
My own conclusion with guitar may help inform your decisions about
lute-midi:
If I need a midi voice, it is easier, less expensive and more reliable
to use a keyboard controller to get it.
That is why I sold my old Roland system.
This quest is probably a pipe dream. I will probably end up getting
another guitar based system at some point. It is just that lute is my
main instrument and I think more in terms of lute than guitar these
days. I have been doing a lot of improvisation on the lute lately and
midi is a kind of natural next step. Of course with a midi system I
could have a guitar controller come out in lute tuning but I am more
interested in the combination of acoustic and midi sounds.
Transposition just sucks because unless you are playing at deafening
levels you will hear the acoustic sound grating against the midi.
Thanks,
Ed Durbrow
Saitama, Japan
edurb...@sea.plala.or.jp
http://www9.plala.or.jp/edurbrow/
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