Piezo pickup w/ separate string output + MG2

Hello all. I have searched around the forum first and I might have been better off emailing the creators but probably a good idea to share my ideas here anyway. I do not yet own MG2 and am hoping to learn some details about it from those who are experienced with it.

I have a LR Baggs Piezo X bridge for my 09 Mexican Fender Player Strat which I’m currently installing. It’s a doozy of a job, have to drill out and dowel+glue the two outermost bridge screw holes to account for different bridge hole spacing than what the piezo bridge has, but in the end, thanks to a modified Baggs X Control preamp kit my strat will have a stereo output jack that is switchable between piezo, magnetic, and piezo+mag pickups together, and will also (thanks to further custom wiring of the piezo saddles which may or may not involve a raspberry pi pico to allow for further fun ideas like built in effects :sweat_smile:) will also be capable of separate string output via the piezo bridge.

It sounds like MG2 only allows for tracking 4 notes at one time, which is fine, but I imagine that it might struggle to track polyphonics well when you are playing 4 strings at once. Is this the case? Or does it keep up just fine when you’re playing lots of 4 note chords? Also curious what it does when you strum all 6 strings, but that’s unrelated to the question.

Now disclaimer, this is all entirely irrelevant if the plugin does a consistently killer job tracking 4 simultaneous notes, and if so, skip reading the rest and just tell me I’m wasting my tiny bit of brain power :upside_down_face: I simply don’t own the software to test it yet.

Question is:
ASSUMING that it may sometimes struggle to track notes when you’re playing 4 at a time frequently, would feeding these separate string output signals through the software increase it’s note tracking accuracy significantly?

Bonus question: in order to see this potential benefit, would I have to run 4 separate audio tracks, each with the MG2 plugin applied? I imagine that in Ableton I could apply MG2 to an effects bus and route the outputs of the 4 strings of choice to that effects bus, but then at that point I wonder if it would be any different than just having a regular guitar setup on a single audio track w/ MG2 applied, as it’s still combining the input signals at the plugin on the effects bus. I know nothing of the intricacies of how the effects bus or the MG2 plugin work, so I’d love to hear from anyone who has any insight on this.

Sorry to be so verbose. Thank you all for reading, I look forward to joining the family of happy MG2 users soon :slight_smile:

-Jak

if you group your piezos in 2 or 3 channels going into 3 MG’s: you’ll get better polyphony yes. Each MG then converts only 2 or 3 strings.
You might encounter crosstalk with piezos though: their separation is allways less than with hex magnetic pickups, there’s mechanical bleed across the bridge.

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