I play lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and electric bass, so this is intriguing. The high-level answer to your question is that you can use MIDI Guitar 2 to send MIDI to NOTION 6 . . . THOUGHTSI downloaded and installed the trial version of MIDI Guitar 2 (Jam Origin) and then did some experiments . . .
MIDI Guitar 2 (Jam Origin)I do everything on the Mac Pro (Early 2008) running Mac OS X 10.11.6 (El Capitan) here in the sound isolation studio, and the install was easy . . .
It took me about two hours to make enough sense of everything to have a bit of success, which is encouraging with respect to this actually working with NOTION 6 on the Mac . . .
The trial version of MIDI Guitar 2 does
not allow saving patches, so I think everything is easier when you have the licensed version, which costs $99 (US), approximately . . .
I used my Fender Custom Shop Telecaster for the experiments . . .
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NOTE: As best as I can determine, a Country Western guitar player ordered this guitar but did not like it due to a minor flaw in the rosewood fretboard. There are several reasons for this guess, and one is that the volume and tone controls are reversed (which makes it easy to do steel guitar emulations, basically swells) and another is the way the pickups are selected and built (hand-wired Telecaster style bridge pickup and two Stratocaster style pickups [middle and neck]). I call it "Sweet Sixteen", and it tends to play itself in the sense that it is a guitar which is naturally playable, which is one way to explain it. This is a metaphysical type of thing, and when a guitar is what I call "naturally playable", it is an excellent guitar for composing. I have several, naturally playable electric guitars, and it took me quite a while to find them--sometimes requiring examining every electric guitar at two Guitar Centers at least twice a week over a year or longer until one of them "felt good", which also is a metaphysical type of thing. There are a few primary rules here in the sound isolation studio, and one of them is that instruments must be tunable; another is that they must be able to stay in tune at least for the duration of a song; and they need to "feel good" (which is the naturally playable, metaphysical aspect). "Sweet Sixteen" does not have a whammy bar, so it's primarily a rhythm guitar, which is fine with me. I use it to compose chord patterns. Making it all the more FUN, since at the time I was a very good Guitar Center customer, the price for me was nearly absurdly discounted. I think the Fender sales representative told them to sell it for whatever they could get, which for me mapped to being able to buy it for about $500 (US), including a nice guitar case, when at the time (about 20 years ago) a Fender American Deluxe Telecaster was about $2,000 [US], which is what I call a "good" professional level guitar but is not so good as a handcrafted Custom Shop guitar. It's an excellent Telecaster, and the "minor flaw" is just a darker than normal streak in the rosewood, which is entirely visual and is fine with me. Here in the sound isolation studio, I care about the way instruments play and sound, not so much about the way they look. Explained another way, it's a magical Telecaster . . . ]
"Sweet Sixteen" ~ Fender Custom Shop Telecaster (circa 1999) [
NOTE: This YouTube video shows some of the things you can do when the volume, tone, and switch controls are flipped, which includes changing the position of the volume and tone controls so the volume control is at the front. The pickup selector switch needs to be flipped, as well. Not shown in the YouTube video, "Sweet Sixteen" has a custom 5-position pickup selector, since it has three pickups (bridge, middle, neck) rather than the traditional two pickups (bridge and neck). The middle and neck pickups are Stratocaster style pickups, but I might replace them with a Seymour Duncan "Duckbucker" pickup (middle) and a "Lipstick" style Stratocaster pickup (neck), or a pair of "Lipstick" pickups, since (a) I like the way they sound and look and (b) I used them as part of the custom mods to my Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster, which for reference has two separate and independent output circuits, hence can be used to drive two separate and independent guitar pedal rigs to create what I call a "Wall of Guitars" . . . ]
"Sweet Sixteen" ~ Fender Custom Shop Telecaster (circa 1999) ~ Pickups and Controls The Fabulous Fifty Million Dollar Trinaural Stratocaster[
NOTE: This is a console electric steel guitar (not an electric pedal steel guitar), but it can be emulated on a Telecaster when the controls are flipped, albeit with a lot of practicing. I call it a "steel guitar" to keep the terminology simple. Here in the sound isolation studio, a "steel guitar" is a pedal steel guitar but without the pedals (or a pedal steel guitar but not using the pedals). In this context "electric" is redundant, since all these "steel guitars" are electric, but so what . . . ]
Pedal Steel GuitarPedal Steel Guitar (Wikipedia)It took me about an hour to make sense of the basic setup for MIDI Guitar 2, and it took a few more hours to discover how to get it working with NOTION 6 and to create this post . . .
The key is that that in the default "TEST PIANO" interface, you need to disable or set a lot of stuff to "None". Additionally, I set it to "MONOPHONIC" . . .
In this specific context--using MIDI Guitar 2 and an electric guitar as a MIDI input device--the reason to disable all the special effects and to fine-tune the note tracking is that you want to focus MIDI Guitar 2 on identifying notes, since the goal is to use NOTON 6 and its virtual instruments (native or third-party VSTi virtual instruments) to generate the sounds . . .
I used the
standalone version of MIDI Guitar 2; and I think this is important and probably
required for use with NOTION 6; since you want it to be like an external or virtual MIDI keyboard, which in turn maps to its needing to be standalone rather than running as a VSTi virtual instrument in NOTION 6 . . .
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NOTE: The trial version is standalone-only, so there is no VSTi virtual instrument functionality in the trial version. VSTi virtual instrument functionality comes with the paid version and its respective license . . . ]
And you need to configure it to output MIDI to a Mac OS X "virtual MIDI cable", which in turn needs to be set in NOTION 6 Preferences as the MIDI Input Port . . .
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NOTE: I am using a MOTU 828mk3 Hybrid external audio and MIDI interface, and at present have the main output set to Channel 3-4, which is the reason for the MOTU 828mk3 settings, where usually the main output is set to Main 1-2. I created an IAC Bus in the Mac OS X "Audio MIDI Setup" app, which comes with Mac OS X and is found in the "Utilities" subfolder of the "Applications" folder . . . ]
NOTION 6 Preferences ~ MIDI IO Tab[
NOTE: The Mac OS X "IAC Driver" is used to create "virtual MIDI cable" buses . . . ]
Mac OS X ~ Audio MIDI Setup ~ MIDI Studio WindowAfter discovering most of the requirements for configuring everything correctly, I was able to record MIDI in NOTION 6, which is good . . .
However, it was not so precise; hence I think there is more configuration work that needs to be done to fine-tune MIDI Guitar 2 and perhaps the NOTION 6 "MIDI Record" options, as well . . .
When I set the "Latency" in MIDI Guitar 2 to the lowest value, the results were better . . .
The lowest value is "
[email protected] KHZ", which is lower than the value in the first screenshot (
see above) . . .
There is more to the overall configuring and fine-tuning; and it's important to set the volume level on the guitar and MIDI Guitar 2, as well as the MIDI Guitar 2 noise gate (which I set to the lowest value to make it nearly instantly OFF when the note played on the guitar drops in volume level, where "lowest value" is when the noise gate control is all the way to the left, which makes it a very
rapid noise gate). I need to do more experiments to determine the ideal configuration; and there is a bit of merit to getting polyphonic working, if this is possible . . .
I have a MIDI monitoring application ("MIDI Monitor" [Snoize]) that lets me watch MIDI messages, and this was how I verified that MIDI Guitar 2 was doing real-time MIDI output before I discovered what needs to be done to get it working with NOTION 6 . . .
MIDI Monitor (Snoize)I ran MIDI Monitor and set it's filters to show only note messages for Channel 1; and there was activity, which verified MIDI Guitar 2 was doing MIDI output, which was an important clue in determining why NOTION 6 was not receiving any MIDI from MIDI Guitar 2 . . .
The reason was that I had not configured MIDI Guitar 2 to send MIDI
output via IAC Bus 1 . . .
Once I got that part of the MIDI Guitar 2 interface properly configured, NOTION 6 received MIDI from MIDI Guitar 2; and now it's mostly a matter of fine-tuning MIDI Guitar 2, the electric guitar itself, and NOTION 6 for the best and most distinct MIDI, which will require more experimenting here in the sound isolation studio . . .
SUMMARYMIDI Guitar 2 works with NOTION 6, but everything needs to be configured correctly . . .
When the rules make more sense, I will post some follow-up information; but based on a few hours of experimenting, I can state that MIDI Guitar 2 works with NOTION 6 in a general way . . .
I think that once I discover how to fine-tune the note tracking and converting to MIDI, it will work better . . .
Lots of FUN! P. S. I did a bit of price checking on new Telecasters and was a bit surprised that the prices appear to be significantly lower today than they were 20 years ago . . .
The only logical explanation is that they are made robotically now and have very little handcrafting, other than the Fender Custom Shop "Masterbuilt" models, which are considerably more expensive now . . .
At least it's still possible to get an
excellent Telecaster, which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous!