This week the conclusion was made that the idea #1 “Guitar Drum Map” will not be pursued any further. If you followed my previous posts, this should not come as a surprise as I almost immediately focused on my other idea, the Extended Guitar Performance. However, I still wanted to keep the idea as a back-up, at least until now. With my Extended Guitar Performance idea going quite well, I decided to officially quit pursuing the Guitar Drum Map. The reasons therefor are various.
First of all, researching for two ideas simultaneously is very time-consuming and, considering the workload of other subjects this semester, not reasonable.
Furthermore, I wanted to make my project an opportunity for me to learn and work with Pure Data and possibly other kinds of programming since I have not much experience in this field yet. Current research, however, suggests, that working with Pure Data will probably not be necessary for the Idea #1 “Guitar Drum Map”.
There are already several commercial products available that enable a guitar audio-to-MIDI conversion that feature DAW integration and can be used to trigger VST drum instruments. Consequently, it would be unnecessary to develop a custom Pure Data solution.
Said products include:
- Roland GK-3 hexaphonic pick-up
- May be used with Roland and BOSS guitar synthesizers only
- Fishman TriplePlay hexaphonic pick-up
- Direct MIDI output
- Jam Origin MIDI Guitar 2 software
- I tested the trial version of the software. Unfortunately, I was not compatible with Cubase’s Groove Agent, my go-to drum VST. However, I tested out other sounds and was not totally convinced. There is still some latency, especially when playing chords.
Moreover, I spoke to a fellow guitarist of mine about the idea and he raised additional doubts concerning the actual practicability and usage of such a guitar audio-to-MIDI solution. This further discouraged me from pursuing the idea since one of my goals with this project is definitely to make something that other musicians/guitarist can benefit from and find applications for.
My final reasons to abandon this idea is that I find it really difficult to find a “Unique Selling Proposition” so to speak that makes the idea stand out and sufficiently innovative.
As already mentioned, I will, instead, focus on my second idea “Extended Guitar Performance” for the remainder of this semester (and hopefully my master).
Nevertheless, the time invested in this project was not completely in vain: The Fishman Triple Play pick-up found during the research may still come in handy for my other idea Extended Guitar Performance and I will keep it in the back of my head.
Sources:
https://www.thomann.de/at/fishman_triple_play.htm
