Guitar players levelled a lot of criticism at earlier MIDI guitar systems and indeed many are still suspicious. While most MIDI guitar synths include a separate MIDI Out for driving other sound modules or recording into a DAW, there are also stand-alone guitar-to-MIDI converters such as Roland’s GI-20 for those who don’t need on-board sounds. The outputs from these six segments can then be processed separately. A hex pickup is essentially six pickups in one so that each strings gets its own pickup segment. While their first guitar synths employed analogue circuitry to track string pitch using a divided pickup to separate the sounds from the individual strings, as soon as MIDI became mainstream, they adapted their hex pickup system to work with that too. It is probably fair to credit Roland for the most dogged pursuit of the guitar-to-MIDI goal though other companies have also played significant roles. If progress seems to have been slow, that’s because combining the world of vibrating wire strings with a protocol designed for simple switches is far from trivial. Some manufacturers have even replaced the guitar fingerboard with button switches to create a sort of guitar-friendly keyboard instrument, but the focus of this article is to explain how the various means of getting polyphonic MIDI data from a ‘real’ guitar have evolved over the past four decades. Using the frets and strings as switch contacts has been tried but it tends to be very unreliable because of fret buzz and the oxidisation of the metal frets and strings. That’s all very well but how do you get a guitar to generate MIDI? Put a pressure sensor under the key and you can also generate aftertouch data. Adding a couple more contacts to the switch allows the time it takes to depress the key to be calculated, which in turn translates into note velocity or how hard you hit the key. Each switch is associated with a particular key on the keyboard so there’s no ambiguity as to which key you have pressed, and when you release the key, it’s also clear to the receiving piece of circuitry that you stopped holding down that key. MIDI is an extremely well-conceived protocol for sending and receiving musical data and it can easily be controlled by a bank of switches such as the ones found under the keys of your controller keyboard. So, how do you get a guitar to generate MIDI?
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