MIDI Guitar 2 – release notes

This is some background information about MIDI Guitar 2, how it came to be, what’s new in it, and where we go from here.

About two years ago (half a year before before the release of MIDI Guitar 1) we had some signs that there were significant tracking improvements waiting to be picked up, somewhere in the estranged intersection of signal processing, neural networks and laws of physics. We begun development of version 2 while finishing MIDI Guitar 1.

I had written some kind of manifesto on my wall. It was all about tracking improvements but I didn’t quite know how to make sense of it at the time. In free translation and retrospect, it was something like this:

A kind of Manifesto

Don’t ever miss a single note, regardless of how fast you play, how you pick or hammer-on, pull-off or tab. Either the note is sounding or its not. And if it is there we should catch it. Music is unforgiving.
Setup options don’t help. Why do we need those setup options? Its not like our human brain has to try out and roll back different settings before it can recognize a sound. It should just work.
Velocity is a big deal. We all love guitars for their dynamics. The MIDI domain should be no different. If velocity is wrong it’s no longer a guitar.
It’s not about guitars. It’s not about what type of guitar or pickups you play, not even about vibrating strings. It’s is really about making sense of various forms of noise – only then it will be robust.
Don’t go with physics. It won’t go with you.

Major tracking improvements

It has been almost 2 years now – of hard work on version 2 (making it 7 years in total). And oh dear, it has been a long and windy road. At times we even considered a full stop and spend our time solving less daunting problems instead. Thankfully its here now – and where are we?

The manifesto was meant to set the overall direction, but it has made an impact, and each point above corresponds to tracking improvements you will find in MIDI Guitar 2, albeit less bold:

It is much more sensitive than version 1, and even in the fastest legato runs it is unlikely to ever miss a note.
There are no longer any tracking setup options. It just works.
The velocity response is much greatly improved and it does indeed seem to translate into an improved feel.
Tracking is more robust across various kind of guitars and playing styles. Indeed the same technology will be soon powering software for other instruments (bass and violin are first in line).
Latency was reduced, especially for the monophonic setting and generally on hollow body and half-acoustic guitars.

All that said, I certainly don’t want to claim everything is solved by now or that MIDI Guitar 2 is perfect, but I hope you too will experience that it has come a long way.

There are currently a few caveats to the above:

First, the high sensitivity means that it picks up everything. It might be a problem for some players, especially when driving not-so-velocity-sensitive synths. We found that sloppy guitar players usually like the higher sensitivity as notes will be picked up even with sloppy articulations, but they will have to be careful to not trigger a wrong note. We will make some adjustments in the next BETAs based upon user feedback so please let us know how you feel.
Related to this, the monophonic tracking is faster than ever, but it might be a little too wild at the moment, and we expect it to have an update for that within a couple of weeks.
Finally, there is actually one setup option. It’s a noise gate but it is easy to deal with as it only has effect when you are not playing. It is the only means you have to interact with the tracking system. One thing to keep in mind is that for fast legato runs you might need to turn down this noise gate (to pick up very soft notes).

Please remember this is a BETA release and a tech preview. As users get hands on and we receive feedback it is inevitable that we need to adjust some things and fix some bugs. Thus, in the coming weeks we will bring a series of MG2 updates based upon feedback from all of you. The missing plugins will be released and hopefully we will be out of BETA within weeks. Soon after, bass and violin players will get a long awaited treatment.

Please let us know about your experience. In the times of updates it can be difficult for us to answer every email (and still have time to work on the updates) but we will do our best, and any feedback is much appreciated.

New features

MIDI Guitar 2 is not only about tracking improvements. We’ve sneaked in a many new features as well.

Hoover over the hotspots in the image to get descriptions of new features.

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The near Future

MIDI Guitar 2 is a major milestone for us, but its also just another step in our overall pursuit to keep pushing the audio recognition technology that MIDI Guitar builds upon.

In the next weeks you will see a series of incremental updates of MIDI Guitar 2, until we are 100% satisfied with it and move out of BETA status. The plugins and a few features are currently missing from the first BETA and most likely we will have to iron out some tracking issues and other bugs as well.

We also plan to release MIDI Bass and -Violin shortly after and we have prepared for a unified release cycle so that in the future all 3 products will get updates in parallel whenever a new feature is ready.

The near future looks very exciting form here and there is so much more to say about future products. Keep an eye on this site for teasers and please join us, give feedback and make requests for new features, etc.

All for now, stay tuned.

MIDI Guitar 2 – release notes

A kind of Manifesto

Major tracking improvements

New features

The near Future

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