Official Luthiers Forum!

Anyone done a MIDI output on a guitar? I am curious what all is involved. There are only a few companies that I know of that offer this (Carvin, Gretsch I think etc. ) Sadly enough, I am curious about this because I would like to see if I can make any guitar work with Rock Band 3 when it comes out in October.

thanks,
John

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John Thiessen
http://www.iszacguitars.com

midi is quite simple... you hook up a piezo to a 1/4 inch jack then the jack goes to a drum machine or module with midi on it... thats the 2 dollar route

the expensive route is to cut large cavities in your guitar and get a graghtech ghost midi system

another way is to use a piezo hooked up to an arduino which is wired to a 13 pin mid and program it the open-source way

i personally prefer the 2 dollar route simply because i can use any type of drum machine, or any module that coverts 1/4 piezo to midi and you can find that stuff cheap on ebay

imo, the less electronics in the git the better.
one reason, it gets moved around and could get bumped or even dropped.
also technology is changing so much, that it might be outdated in a couple of years.
might be fun to try though!

I did a little more research on it, and it appears that Fender has some sort of "technology" in the neck that allows the video game to know where your hands are on the guitar. It appears to be a 5 pin MIDI as well. I think that it would be way more cost effective to just buy the guitar/controller Fender is putting out and make it more playable than to make something from scratch. Might be fun to try, but the Ghost MIDI stuff is $200, probably not worth it. Thanks for the replies though,

John

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John Thiessen
http://www.iszacguitars.com