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Budget MIDI GuitarMar 09 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Musical Instruments
The Bottom Line The Roland GK-2A & GI-10 are great for converting guitar notes into MIDI data at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated MIDI guitar.
From $999
When one talks about producing music in MIDI, invariably the vision of stacks of keyboards & MIDI sound modules come to mind. Guitarists are usually not in the picture. I think there are 2 main reasons for this. One, MIDI guitars of reasonable quality are usually very expensive. For example, the MIDI Fly from Parker Guitars costs $3,500. Two, there has always been the concern that tracking is not accurate on a MIDI guitar. It is difficult to record string bends in MIDI. For the above reasons, guitarists are usually not keen to venture into the realm of MIDI guitars. Being a guitarist for about 20 years, I too never considered playing MIDI on the guitar until very recently. A friend of mine bought the Roland GK-2A MIDI pickup & GI-10 MIDI converter but couldn't seem to get the tracking to work properly. Frustrated, he offered to sell the said items to me for about $100. I thought, what a bargain! Why not just give it a try. I went to the local music store a bought a cheap Ibanez (can't even be bothered with the model no.) for about $150, went home & screwed the GK-2A onto the guitar. (No way was I going to drill holes in my Fender American Standard Strat!!) The GK-2A's pickup comes with 2 screws & springs so that you can adjust the gap between the pickup and the strings to about 1mm (recommended). The pickup is then connected to a almost triangular shaped control panel which may be mounted to the top of the guitar by double sided tape, velcro or a screw. Here's the odd part: it only has one hole for a screw. I can imagine that it will rotate from side to side if screwed in because it is only held by one screw. Anyway, I opted for the double sided tape setup. The controller has 2 buttons which can be used to select different sound patches from suitable sound modules. It also has a volume control & a "mixer" which allows you to chose be output sound: MIDI, guitar or both. I connected it to the GI-10 which acts as a converter which turns the electromagnetic signals from the pickup into MIDI data. The GI-10 is in turn connected to my Roland JV1010 sound module using MIDI cables. From my JV1010, the MIDI data is routed to my PC through a Sound Blaster Live Platinum soundcard with Live Drive II (which has MIDI I/O). I use Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 as the sequencer. With this set up, I was amazed that I could get fantastic tracking on my Ibanez. Before I knew what hit me, I was playing the "piano" on my Ibanez. There was absolutely no latency problem. Once the various sensitivity & bending settings on the GI-10 were adjusted properly and the height of the GK-2A pickup was fine-tuned, I had absolutely no tracking problem that my friend was talking about. I also find that the trigger speed (another common complain with MIDI guitar users) was very good. The thing that really amazed me was the ease of setting up the whole thing. With only a few adjustments on the GI-10, you're ready to go. I suspect the problem with my friend's set up was that he did not screw the pickup into his precious Fender '57 Reissue. Mounting it with double sided tape just wouldn't cut it! The total cost of my MIDI guitar (guitar + pickup + converter) is merely $250. Talk about a budget setup! The GK-2A is an industry standard. Various guitar manufacturers (including Fender) have included it in their "MIDI ready" guitars. I think it is a marvelous piece of equipment & is really value for money. So if you are a guitarist and have always wondered how to get that lick recorded in MIDI without fumbling with a keyboard, wonder no more!  |
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