Looper's Delight Archive Top (Search)
Date Index
Thread Index
Author Index
Looper's Delight Home
Mailing List Info

[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Date Index][Thread Index][Author Index]

RE: guitarists: triple play?



I cannibalised a Sonnus and put it inside an instrument for a friend, had 
it
linked it by a small patch cord, it worked nicely but was hell to replace
the battery

-----Original Message-----
From: andy butler [mailto:akbutler@tiscali.co.uk] 
Sent: Monday, 5 January 2015 7:46 PM
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: guitarists: triple play?



On 05/01/2015 09:35, Diarmuid Pigott wrote:

> My own experience of MIDI from strings is that the detection of 
> vibrato and bend and gliss is pretty much dependant on the MIDI 
> instrument
I am using.

I think there's a bit of a miss-conception going around.

The Midi instrument actually has nothing to do with detection, it only
responds to midi commands.
By then the detection is already done.
What *is* important is that the Midi instrument needs to respond correctly
in order to interpret the pitch information correctly.
i.e. the amount of pitch change in response to MidiPitchBend has to be set
correctly.
That's actually rather trivial to set up, as long as the midi instrument
supports it.

For a device like the Fishman the situation is a bit different, in that
there may be processing of the audio from the pickup.
In that case it's obviously possible to pass the audio in some form and get
what seems like "perfect tracking", when no tracking has been needed.

For note detection there's an absolute limit that's never going to be
beaten.
I look at it from a slightly different angle to the usual idea of note
frequencies.
The impulse from plucking the string has to travel up to the fret and back
to the pickup before it's possible to calculate which fret was used.

Using that way of looking at things the Axon system can make a the quickest
possible guess at what the note played is, then it uses a more regular
analysis to measure the frequency. Should the initial guess be wrong a
correction is made to the Note-On that was sent using MidiPitchBend.
As the Axon system is patented then it kind of looks like no-ones going to
get faster tracking without licensing it.

Warbling on a sustained note occurs when the fundamental of the note fades
before the harmonics, so on some instruments there'll be one or two notes
that warble every time.
Just down to the resonance of the instrument.
If the instrument is specially designed to work with midi convertion I
suspect they spend a lot of time working removing any 'bad notes'.

If there's going to be any improvement over the Axon system it won't be in
fast detection of the note, but rather in the ability to keep tracking a
note as it dies away.


andy
ps. for playing around, the monophonic devices by Sonuus have somewhat
slower note detection but are fairly warble resistant.