Midi Guitar 3 and electric bass

Hi, will MG3 be able to track the range of an electric bass?

Thank you
Franco

Only down to E2 at current stage.

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Thanks for your answer. Perhaps we need to surrender to the evidence that the transduction from analog to MIDI of a low frequency is and will always be an insurmountable problem :frowning:

MIDI Bass already exists (and works great), and we are expecting an updated version once MIDI Guitar 3 has been sorted out.

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Note that the MIDI Cello beta out right now will track down to E1. It’s two-note polyphony instead of six, and tracking down that low does feel just a little more sluggish, but it works! I myself wanted to test MIDI Cello with guitar because my “home” guitar tuning is the C2-G2-D3-A3-E4-G4 Guitar Craft tuning, and Crafties lean on the notes below standard guitar E2 quite a lot. I wanted to see how it handled my C2, which it does nicely!

And it is possible to run an instance of MIDI Cello and an instance of MIDI Guitar simultaneously, too. With pitch filters, you could reasonably set things up to pick up your lowest one or two notes with MIDI Cello, and have the rest picked up by MIDI Guitar, and have them both sent to the same instrument…or, send them to different ones! (Some of the revelations of this beta effort have been pretty landscape-changing for me.)

Anyway, food for thought, and hopefully you find that useful.

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Well…I went in a different direction to make my Bass work as good as a guitar for MIDIguitar v2 and v3. It will cost you about 20$

I like to play bass and as much as I want to…I ‘’ can’t ‘’ play the guitar ( don’t get me wroung, I love the sound ) but physically, I don’t like the instrument. I just LOOOVE my Basses.

Long story short, I simply bought the following Piccolo Bass Strings ( guitar strings that can be put on a Bass) : EXL280 Nickel Wound Piccolo | Bass Guitar Strings | D'Addario

You’ll have your bass performing as good as a guitar with MIDIguitar v2 or v3.

The only modification I did on my cheapest Bass (stagg) was to set the ‘‘string action’’ as close to the neck without having the strings buzzing.

Cheers :metal::grinning::metal:

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this is a really effective solution. the feel of your good old bass, but with a much more playable responsiveness.

it’s especially nice on synth bass sounds with slower attacks.

d’addario also sells individual strings, i kept the two top strings from a standard set and added a couple like this:

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great!
I’ll check it out
Thank you so much

yes but the iOS version currently does not go below D2
Thank you for the answer

Thanks for the reply. It’s very interesting, I’ll give it a try on one of my basses. Thanks again

Thanks for the reply. I’ll give it a try on one of my basses. Thanks again

a fast pitchshifter in front of MG will work. e.g. Space Guitar will do.

You hadn’t mentioned which OS. Best of luck.

You are right… my fault
Thank you again

Thank you sir, good idea

Ah, sorry, I did kinda assume you were talking about MG3. :slight_smile:

For me, before the MG3 beta, my use of MG was almost exclusively on iOS MG2, and I very much appreciated the availability of the D2 note with full polyphony–and FTR, if you switch to mono in MG2, you can get down to C2 as well (er, at least in one of the clients–as I consider this, it may be that the MG2 C2-in-mono option is only desktop, not iOS). Might be worth checking out!

And there is this: if you haven’t given MG3 a spin yet, boy, are you in for a treat. It’s intoxicating to hear yourself start to “play to the MPE data” in real-time as you hear the expression come out of your hands!

I am really hoping that the eventual MG3 implementation on iOS carries most of the functionality of the desktop client that we see in the beta now, specifically because of the QuantiLoop iOS app. For me, the QuantiLoop app makes iOS the natural “all-in-box” preference for what I want to do (at least, I have not found any sort of soft looper in desktop form that is even close to as elegant as QL is), and what got me so excited about MG2 in the first place was figuring out how to bring QL, SampleTank, and AmpliTube together using Audiobus.

MG3 as we know it now is a much more user-functional plugin host than MG2, and once available on iOS, one might not even need to use Audiobus for most of what I was trying to do before; MG3 may be able to neatly send both guitar and instrument audio to QL, and have the whole enchilada in simpler form.

Anyway, the MG2 “full polyphony down to D2” has been really useful for my tuning. What I’ve found interesting, though, is that MG3 is actually changing my thinking about “how to play” other instruments with different pitch ranges anyway, so its current limit of E2 actually hasn’t been nearly as much of a limitation as I’d have thought. And @JasonMorin’s suggestion of tuning piccolo actually sounds like fair genius if you’re looking at your instrument as a dedicated MG3 controller! (If I wasn’t specifically interested in being able to live-switch between guitar audio and MG3-driven instruments while in my home tuning, I would probably do something exactly like that–I’d probably just tune Guitar Craft intervals from E2 instead of C2, using a really tiny string for what would be a first-string B4 note, and use Transposer machines whenever necessary. :nerd_face:)

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Wow! Your answer gave me a lot of ideas for how to set up my next setup. We hope that an iOS version of MG3 will be released soon and I honestly believe that the power of the new processors will allow it to have the same features as the desktop version. Thanks again Kevin!

Thanks to all for the suggestion of using a piccolo bass with MG3. I had a short scale Mustang that was not seeing much use and now have converted it over. Way easier to program bass lines actually playing bass. And using Polychrome DSP’s Hypertune, I can tune the audio down an octave and it sounds like a pretty decent bass (especially with the tone rolled down).

@49ND

Can you explain the bass piccolo strings trick in detail? Can I use exl280 piccolo strings directly on my standard-length bass? Does the MG3 require any additional setup after stringing?

the exl280’s are long scale strings which will work fine on a standard length bass.

mg3 won’t need additional configuration, but whichever synth you choose will need to be tuned down an octave.

try the bridge pickup only first, with the tone all the way up.

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I only play short scale basses, but I bought a set of those strings to install on my headless Ibanez EHB1000S. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble with string windings loosening due to the way strings are clamped at the head. At least I hope so.

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