Hello, first post here, but have owned MG for over a year now. Just thinking out loud about how to clean up the tracking above and beyond what has already been mentioned (bright bridge pickup, clean technique, input gain set correctly, etc).
If the user had an opportunity to create a guitar specifically for MG2, what would be the optimum setup (scale length, wood, how nonresonant should it be)? And what would be the ideal pickup signal for MG2 (bridge position bright humbucker perhaps)? Maybe if a player had a Variax he could take some of these tips and create a pickup model that is optimized for MG2. Clean piezo bridge only is also an option.
MG was made to be robust and behave reasonable to just about anything you throw into it.
It was trained with samples from more than 100 guitars plus two variaxes (which was later removed form training, if I recall). It try to hit the middle of the road and will generally perform reasonably close to what physics allow for guitar-like instruments.
The main idea is that you play your favourite old guitar, for the sound you like, and sometimes you switch over to MIDI or blend with guitar tone.
For optimal tracking the most critical is to avoid resonance: Solid body, Hard wood. Heavy. You also want bright sound with lots of harmonics. Bridge pickup. Thinner strings.
But again, it also works with a mic’ed hollow body acoustic.
Hello JamO, thank you very much for the quick and comprehensive reply. This will be very helpful going forward, especially the optimum characteristics of the guitar (although a guitar used with MG does not have to have these). The most interesting thing is the suggestion of thinner strings; it is a usual assumption in standard guitar to midi converters that thicker strings are better than thin. I’m looking forward to experimenting with this in the future.
I did a bit of experimenting with my "synth " guitar (a heavy Strat type with big neck, not terribly resonant, and EMGs with a single coil tap in the bridge), and indeed the best response was with the bridge pickup in single coil mode. This guitar has fairly heavy strings, but worked flawlessly with MG2 when the MG parameters were set up properly.
As an aside, if a player has tracking or glitching problems with some synth plugins but not with others, it helps to check the plugin with a keyboard to see if the plugin’s tones have excessive attack speed or other atypical characteristics. I was pulling my hair out troubleshooting tones from the Waldorf PPG plugin with MG, but found the PPG tones had unusual attack settings that sounded like poor tracking, but was in the patch itself (present with a keyboard).
I’ve been using midi guitar since the mid 80s (started with a GM-70 Roland system with G-202 guitar) and have used about everything since, including my current GR-55. But honestly the tracking and overall playing quality of MG with plugins are comparable with a well set up Roland GR-55 with internal sounds, but you are not limited to the Roland tones with MG. And the midi out of every Roland 13 pin product I’ve used has been fairly awful. Basically MG has made the Roland system obsolete unless you need different patches on each string.
Bravo for creating what is frankly a miraculous product!!
