I think I’ve written before about my frustration with guitar synthesizers / guitar-to-MIDI conversion. It’s a difficult problem, more so with polyphony or bass.
But it seems like someone has really cracked it. Nudist Audio Guitarcatcher just plain works. MIDI Guitar 2 never worked super well for me except as an effects processor, and the beta version of MIDI Guitar 3 / MIDI Bass was just plain unusable. But Guitarcatcher has no trouble with my bass, no trouble with polyphony, no false notes, no issues with pitch bends/slides etc. It has its own internal synth (decent if a bit limited) and transmits MPE pitch/pressure, with an additional envelope applied to the incoming dynamics. It doesn’t work very well for non-MPE synths, but that’s to be expected. I’m super impressed, and it’s cheap too.
I wore my fingers out last night playing with it… I haven’t played much bass in a long time and have absolutely no callouses, and wasn’t wearing the glove I often use to help with that. But the fun and wonder were worth it. 🙂
Instead of going for fancier buttons for triggers/gates, I went ahead and ordered the cheap but solid Ladik P-075 Dual Switch, like I used to have a few years ago. It’s compact, and the passive design means more flexibility to use it to mute other signals without tying up a VCA or VC switch. And that will leave me with more open space for something else later.
I also ordered some flat USB cables that I can leave plugged into the back of my Versio, Legio and Alia modules, running them out of a 1HP gap so I can really take advantage of Noise Engineering’s new hot-swap firmware versions. Removing the extra friction of having to unscrew the modules will make a difference, even though I use Knurlies and threaded strips so it’s really not that bad. 🙂