yrg thread

[warza]

Naw, and you raise a good point. That Squire Strat will be 1 5/8ths" at the nut (if not narrower), just like all those Mex and Chinee necks made for 10 year olds. Not true Fender American-standard adult 1 11/16ths". That's going to make for left hand clean fretting and finger picking hell.

I'm partial to 1.75" Warmoths myself. Going down into these kiddie widths is like playing a mandolin.

I'm not trying to be obnoxious about my Warmoth Strat neck on here, but I have to say: originally I had the Roland system on my old Strat that was a decent Squire. It worked ok, as long as there was no string buzz. BUT recently,once I changed it over to my Warmoth guitar - totally different story. I couldn't believe the improvement in tracking. It IS all about feel.

I had the Warmoth neck totally custom designed for my hand, and for cleaner MIDI picking. It's their Wizard profile, totally thin and fast, but I had the width at the nut done wider - slightly more like a classical guitar, so I could really get in there with clean chord voicings.

The neck is made from African Goncalo Alves. The finger board is pitch black Ebony with really thick, smooth frets. The beautiful dark Goncalo wood is so hard that it doesn't need any finnish. When you play it, the notes go right through your hand, like it's alive. I'll never go back to a plastic finish again. Just raw, prime naked wood. The combination of the necks woods (I was guessing, but got lucky) make the whole guitar ring like a bell. Chimey but with rich warm tone to die for. It plays as straight as a razor, and the strings are practically sitting on the neck. All this DOES transfer over to the MIDI pitch system. It was evident immediately when I switched over.

The whole custom neck was only about $350. I can't recommend one of these enough over any store bought instrument I have ever played. Try it - you'll like it

[tapper mike]

Honestly you should never compare a squire with a strat. Entirely different neck composite not to mention other things. Yes a Warmoth neck is top of the line regardless of the shape. They don't have dead zone's or hollow points.


Re the rock band swuier. It's gonna be crap for midi transfer even with that mad catz do-hickey convertor. The other fender midi type thing I've already commented on.

RE YRG it trachs better for real midi then 13 pin systems but it's still got inconcistency issues with velocity settings and could really use more midi controller features. I was really hoping for more out of it.

My Ztar still outperforms all my other midi guitar devices combined.

Re double attacks using fingers,..... that explains everything. use a pick or your finger nails go out and by those finger picks if you have to. your getting too much brush and not enough attack. a string doesn't sound by the pick or finger attacking it the string sounds when the pick or finger releases the string.

[MisterAcoustic]

Wow, so much activity in this thread...

Somebody said (and I think it was tapper mike):

You can tune the ztar to anything you like unlike the YRG which limits you to the presets.

I don't have a YRG yet, but I read a post somewhere that said the individual strings on the YRG are tunable plus or minus one octave.

I guess I'll have to go dig that post up... I don't have time right now though. I'll post it when I find it.

[Maruuk]

Any idea what the cheap Starr will sell for?

Wide necks (up to 2" on classical guitars and even wider on Flamencos) are heaven for clean playing, and essential for finger picking. I find American standard (43mm) acceptable, hate the non-American 42mm, and especially the Squire Affinity series (40.9mm)! Yikes, what are we, The Lollipop Guild???

I think if Fender American started going to 1 3/4" nut widths folks would love em even more!

The YRG feels pretty crapilly narrow, maybe about the equivalent of a 42mm nut width on a guitar.

[Maruuk]

Well obviously their tune doesn't affect pitch, so it's a just a question of how their tension relates to triggering efficiency and feel. I'm not going to mess with em until somebody starts researching them on their own and formulating a reasonable stratagem for their tension.

[Maruuk]

The Mad Katz midi converter won't affect us. It's only for taking midi data from any source into the silly Rock Band world. I want to know if that Squire Strat 5-pin is outputting midi or not. The latest Fender blurb on the thing continues to ignore any mention of midi. Super weird.

I have a query on it at the Fender forum, and usually you can get an employee to answer you there.

[lxm]

Any idea what the cheap Starr will sell for?

$250 based on what i read

[annode]

Just for the record, here is an example of the double triggering I get.
I am mostly picking very lightly .
http://home.comcast.net/~newdabranck/mu ... r.demo.mp3
Set sensitivity to 5 with ver.0003 Control panel

yikes.

thats brutal!!!!

yep...it is.
And like Maruuk sez, adding to this, there's no middle ground where you get sensitive string picking without string-switch bounce,or no switch bounce and no missed-triggers.
Hmmm...you know what I mean haha.

If you use a VSTi synth that doesn't have such a sharp edge on the attack , like the PlugSound sample instrument in my audio demo, you may not notice what's going on with all these triggering probs.

The audio demo shows that when any successive note picked after another picked note along any single string, will trigger when your finger goes down onto the fret and the second trigger comes from when you pick the string.
You hear this clearly.
You also hear me picking a single note multiple times. Even though it sounds like it's doing something odd, it is not, it's the PlugSound VSTi and it's velocity maps. Just needed to clear that up.

I'm hoping it will/has been taken care of in a near future firmware update.

[Maruuk]

$250!? Yowza! Is it in standard guitar neck form factor or some special weirdo thing?

[tapper mike]

Wow, so much activity in this thread...

Somebody said (and I think it was tapper mike):

You can tune the ztar to anything you like unlike the YRG which limits you to the presets.

I don't have a YRG yet, but I read a post somewhere that said the individual strings on the YRG are tunable plus or minus one octave.

I guess I'll have to go dig that post up... I don't have time right now though. I'll post it when I find it.

I have a yrg all you get for tunings are the presets. With the control panel app.exe you can transpose a step at a time across the entire neck (not string by string)

from the YRG website

2. OPEN button
Hidden under this button are over 50 tunings, 12 CAPO settings. Hit it, set it and record it into the preset. Refer to the manual for the listing of all the tunings.
[/quote]
So no you can't create your own tunings you can merely select from the presets available.

Re $250 for ztar game controller. Even if all it was is a game controller without midi that number wouldn't make it worthwhile for starr labs to produce. If it were a game controller only with no midi and was produced offshore I could see a number like that but Harvey doesn't have deep pockets like that and I doubt he's got investors rallied behind him to make it happen.

[glokraw]

A serious fingerpicker might consider removing 2 or 3 of the strings, since its an
experimental setup anyway. Having more space between the remaining strings could be
useful in conjunction with the optional tuning profiles it has built in.

[JAMES L. HARRISON]

Well, it has a tap mode. Does that help? OTOH I don't know enough about midi to know if the data is the type you specify or not.

James
.
.

Anybody run this through MIDI-OX or other monitor yet to see if the YRG spits out any live SysEx data for fret-position *without* strumming?

- m

[JAMES L. HARRISON]

Since I'm the village midiot I hope you won't mind a dumb question. [ggg]
Are you touching the adjacent string? I'm getting something like part of that and I'm pretty sure I'm letting my finger cross to rest/strike against the adjacent string as though playing bass.

Regards,
James
.
.

Just for the record, here is an example of the double triggering I get.
I am mostly picking very lightly .
http://home.comcast.net/~newdabranck/mu ... r.demo.mp3
Set sensitivity to 5 with ver.0003 Control panel

[annode]

Just for the record;
I made a few changes that helped to a degree to alleviate some of the string switch bounce and the hammer-ons.

- removed the strings sensor cover,(where the neck PU would be on a guitar).
- adhered a strip of soft foam about 1/4" thick onto the inside cover of that cover plate, and re-attached. It helped to deaden string vibration which causes false-triggers.

-When the YRG is placed into mono-mode by holding the midi-button down and incrementing the counter up to #17, strings 1-6 each output their respective midi channels 1-6.
- In mono mode, a hammer-on/pull-off, will only send a velocity 1 out until the string is re-struck. On VSTi which employ a legato setting,a hammer-on/PO will only trigger the sustain element of the VSTi's note and not re-trigger the note from it's envelope's attack. This helps so you hear the synth's attack only when you pick the string and not when you finger another fret on that string while holding the struck note at the same time.

It's just a temp thing as far as i'm concerned because you can't play chords if you wanted to, it's only single notes for leads/soloing/scales.

[Elantric]

On mine each of the strings are encased in rubber dampers at each end. These are necesary to attenuate the "double triggering" Im surprised to hear you are adding rubber to your string area under the " neck cover". Makes me wonder if we need to compare pics of our YRG string ends.