Hi there, I’m new to this forum, but I’ve used Midi Guitar 2 quite lot in the past months, and I thought I’d give a comment on the tracking in MG3 beta in case it can be useful to the devs.
I’m using MG3 as an auv3 plugin inside Loopy Pro on a not-so-efficient ipad mini 5, but I have had no problem at all with latency or CPU usage, I found that MG3 in the latest beta is even a bit more efficient in that area than MG2.
Switching from MG2 I encountered two problems : first, the plugin is now VERY sensitive to the pickup, whatever tracking method you use, and secondly the default tracking of MG3 expressive looses a lot of tied notes.
I use a Yamaha Silent Guitar, which is an electro-classical guitar, and there’s a lot of noise coming from the pickup. I knew about it, but with MG2 I didn’t bother filtering the noise too acurately because the gate could get rid of it, but I found that MG3 is so much more sensitive that I’d have to adjust the gate at an insane angle to get rid of the noise, and even that way I still get some odd notes. Anyway I got rid of this problem by applying a much stricter noise reduction and EQ before MG3, and it works fine.
Another thing that I discovered on my pickup thanks to the plugin, is that it creates a little oscillation when a note is sustained, meaning the amplitude isn’t constant. It is not perceptible in the audio signal, and once more it didn’t register in MG2, but I was perplexed when all my synth sounds came out heavily oscillating when I was playing only straight notes. Apparently MG3 not only picks up on this slight volume variations, but it passes them to the Midi output quite accurately. Unfortunately in this case this is an unintened side effect of the pickup + guitar adjustments that create this bizarre flaw in the signal. I found a workaround for this problem also, which is to increase the input gain by a lot, but put a gain element in the chain before outputing to midi with a gain reduction of 30db. I don’t really know why it works, but I suppose the amplitude oscillation is basically negligible with the gain reduction, and the input increase makes up for the lost velocity of the notes.
So to sum it ip I’d say that MG3 being very sensitive is a really good thing for the tracking, but it might mean that you need a much more refined processing chain on your signal than what MG2 required if your pickup isn’t perfect.
Another problem that I ran into, is that the expressive tracker, which seems to be the default one, misses a lot of tied notes, especially if they are semitones. I thought I had a problem with my pickup again until I switched to the “MG2 no bend tracker” and it was flawless. It’s not an issue for me since I don’t use bends, and the tracking in MG3 with this setting is fabulous, capturing even the fastest arpeggios, but if this tracker is supposed to be a legacy setting that could be discontinued then the default MG3 tracker should be at least as good in a situation where there are no bends but fast tied notes.
Well that’s it for my take on MG3 beta, thanks a lot for bringing such an amazing plugin to life ! It might not be plug and play for now, but the results are really brilliant once you get rid of all the little glitches.