Are there a plugins that I can use for guitar effects? I’ve used positive grids BIAS effects in Logic Pro and I’m wondering if there is something like this that I can use within MG3 on my iPad. What I think I want is to use MG3 as my main interface where I have my synth sounds AND my guitar sounds. Is this possible?
FWIW, I have gone over almost exclusively to iPad for my musicking things, and am very happy with it. It started somewhat of necessity (iOS apps almost always being less expensive than their desktop counterparts), but the discovery of a few key things, for me, make it an absolute no-brainer:
AUM Mixer as a plugin host. I really can’t say enough how powerful and worth its cost AUM is, as a plugin host for anything short of hard-core DAW record/mix/master functions. When the first MG3 Beta came out on macOS only, I thought I’d try to make MG3 my plugin host, since I didn’t otherwise have one on Mac, and MG3 is a very capable simple host, for sure! But it does run out of scale, and once the iOS version became available, someone here pointed me to AUM Mixer on iOS, and – yeah, then things just took off. I think MG3 as a plugin is far, far better than MG3 standalone.
MIDI Guitar 3 plugin. From my first contact the MG3 Beta blew me away (I’d been using MG2 previously, but this…goes way beyond that), and here a couple of years later, I still continue to learn things about it that blow me away. Its primary lane is in pitch-to-MIDI tracking (now MPE-level richness), but somewhat to my surprise it has also become an absolute go-to tool for my non-MIDI guitar audio as well. The Transposer works on audio as well as MIDI, and frankly I find it performs as well for 8va and 8vb sounds as my polyphonic TC Sub’n’Up octaver pedal. The Guitar Mods addition is a whole other level that I think is worth mining for creative guitar sounds (I haven’t started that journey in earnest yet but initial testing makes me very interested in the Synth Mod). And the simple ability to play NAM models, now, is proving to be huge. All this, combined with MG3’s creative Patchbay interface to accept MIDI control from the host, means I can use an MG3 plugin instance on an AUM audio Channel called “guitar”, to control amp switching, gain/boost, add a second voice for harmony, from footswitches; plus expose to my simple MIDI control surface, controls to let me adjust the amount of gain boost, or amp mids, etc. And acting in plugin mode means I can have another MG3 instance feeding a SWAM bassoon in a different Channel in the same AUM Session, with a footswitch to toggle between sounds.
Audio Damage’s Enso and Circa looper plugins. I’m really picky about wanting my loopers to have a control for “overdub decay” or “overdub feedback”, being a fan of the evolving soundscape, and after casting about for a bit not finding something really workable, I’d just about concluded that I just couldn’t do it all in the box, and would have to find a software/hardware blended setup that let me use my TC Ditto X4 for that. But then someone on this forum clued me in to the Enso looper, and holy cow, Batman, but I must have just missed that, because it’s perfect for soundscaping. Once I got hooked on that, Audio Damage then released Circa, arguably a bit lighter in weight than Enso for dedicated tape-style soundscaping…but Circa is a 6-track looper, and bogglingly powerful. Most of my AUM “for live” Sessions actually run them in parallel–because you can do that–one Channel for Enso, and one for Circa, giving me anything I could possibly want in looperland.
Audio Modeling’s SWAM instruments. When I first sat down and actually configured a SWAM instrument to play nice with MG3 as an MPE input controller (OOB, the SWAM instruments expect other types of controllers), it was intoxicating. When I first invested in MG2 (sometime around 2018 IIRC) I was amazed just at the ability to play samples, and was very happy with that. But MG3 delivers an MPE-level richness that truly modeled instruments like the SWAM series let you take advantage of, including “things that just aren’t possible on guitar” such as actually increasing the volume on a note (not merely swelling in the guitar’s initial attack but actually increasing the volume on a note with channel pressure), which makes a modeled instrument that can do such things natively (e.g. arco cello, bassoon) sound much more authentic. It’s amazing, and the plugins on iOS are at a level I can actually afford!
There are other things in the iOS landscape, of course. There are other modeled instruments, and samplers, and of course other sound processing plugins like delay, reverb, etc.; the most exciting of these is probably the brand-new Volume Pedal plugin just released on all platforms, which solves a very real problem with achieving smooth, jitter-free audio volume response for a non-linear response curve from a linear-curve MIDI expression pedal.
AUM coordinates all of these as powerfully as you could ask for, and that is what really sold me on moving over to iOS completely. Yes, sometimes there is a gap between what is available on iOS and what’s available on desktop, but I am finding that that gap is very small now, for what I (think I) want to do, and there is usually one or more workarounds to the problem that are “good enough”.
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Okay, I do tend to gush; at work I’m (not without cause) known as the TL;DR guy. But if you’re at the beginning of your iOS journey, maybe you might find the above useful. (At the time I found MG2, I was on iOS, using AmpliTube and JamUp Pro as my “guitar” apps of choice, and QuantiLoop as a (still very impressive) multitrack looper. That was pretty good, and things have come a long way since then!)
Kevin, Thanks for you response! You are doing exactly what I am trying to do - since I’m midway in this journey, I’m wondering if I could hire you for a couple of tutoring sessions. Let me know if your interested. You can text me @ (425) 882-330three
