yrg thread

[Maruuk]

The Yamaha has a number of issues when triggering externally which oddly enough are not there when playing the internal tones. It plays the internals really well, no right hand issues at all, and no spurious notes. And wonder of wonder, it actually does a pretty good job at hammer-ons/offs for the internals. You could play it live on stage and it works. The piano tone actually sounds way cool coming through your guitar amp.

If Yamaha ever put out a half-decent control panel for it where you could tweak the external control properly, it would be a great device.

[MisterAcoustic]

You can still get them new, too.

I know - but there's nowhere that I know of where I can play a new one before buying it. That's why I'm jumping at the chance to get my hands on one - I won't be having that 'grass is greener on the other side of the fence' feeling any more.

[polaris20]

MarkE

If you look at the image presented here -

It was the prototype for 'zi'
Which only has 17 fres It does not have the added features demonstrated on "The rock controller" and it only has 17 frets.

Harvey has a habit of building a prototype then scratching it and starting fresh. The early z7's prototypes did not have joystick, mod wheel or string triggers.

Have you heard anything more about the Rock Controller? I've e-mailed, Twittered, and posted on his blog, yet no answer on price and availability. I am ready to give him my CC #, yet not a response.

Well, my YRG arrived today..

I have not plugged it in or turned it on yet, but I have to say that I'm pleasantly suprised with the feel of it, just giving it the quick once over. It's quite comfortable to play, and the string triggers feel great.

Once I dig into it a bit and actually play it and use the midi functions, I'll try and post some impartial comparisons with my Yamaha G-10 and Ztar (which is a custom Z7s with the newer non-button neck and breath controller) if anyone is interested..

I'd like to hear a comparison from you, but I don't think it'll be favorable when compared to the ZTar. THat's kinda Apples/oranges comparison anyway though.

The Yamaha has a number of issues when triggering externally which oddly enough are not there when playing the internal tones. It plays the internals really well, no right hand issues at all, and no spurious notes. And wonder of wonder, it actually does a pretty good job at hammer-ons/offs for the internals. You could play it live on stage and it works. The piano tone actually sounds way cool coming through your guitar amp.

If Yamaha ever put out a half-decent control panel for it where you could tweak the external control properly, it would be a great device.

Have you tried it with something like MIDIPipe? Apparently solves all the MIDI-related issues on a computer. That's OS X-only though; not sure what you're using. This tutorial does a good job of explaining it:

http://ladiesgeekjournal.com/2009/08/ma ... aha-ez-ag/

You can still get them new, too.

I know - but there's nowhere that I know of where I can play a new one before buying it. That's why I'm jumping at the chance to get my hands on one - I won't be having that 'grass is greener on the other side of the fence' feeling any more.

That makes sense, though Amazon is pretty good about returns, which is why I was considering one.

[jonnyG]

The Yamaha has a number of issues when triggering externally which oddly enough are not there when playing the internal tones. It plays the internals really well, no right hand issues at all, and no spurious notes. And wonder of wonder, it actually does a pretty good job at hammer-ons/offs for the internals. You could play it live on stage and it works. The piano tone actually sounds way cool coming through your guitar amp.

If Yamaha ever put out a half-decent control panel for it where you could tweak the external control properly, it would be a great device.

The MIDI spec wasn't written with guitar controllers in mind. I had a pretty good go at a guitar (monophonic pitch) to MIDI thinger in Bidule a couple of years ago. It tracked fairly well, with lowish latency, but the hard part was translating the nuances (like slides, hammer-ons and pull-offs) into legato while stopping false triggers, retaining sensitivity and making sense of damped notes, doing sensible things with notes that decayed into the noise floor* and whatnot. It also required the right synth, the right patch* and a certain playing style*.

Tossing out the MIDI layer of abstraction and using it to trigger an internal synth directly using pitch, velocity and envelope data was much easier. It was only monophonic and it ate CPU so it eventually died on the vine.

*These three things are fundamentally interlinked.

Edit: On hardware interfaces where the fretboard is a series of actual or virtual switches then this situation is simplified - send a note-off when the note is unfretted. Except this doesn't work for open strings. An interesting set of problems that are begging for fuzzy logic or even a neural net!

[Maruuk]

Good point about the EZ-EG not really designed as a midi controller. Heck, it spits out midi data into a number of separate midi channels which drives you crazy.

I used something like Midi Pipe on my PC, a little app some guy worked up. It improved things, but it was complicated and technical, and hard to make handshake with the host. Too much money business for me to get involved in it, as Mr. Berry says.

[polaris20]

Good point about the EZ-EG not really designed as a midi controller. Heck, it spits out midi data into a number of separate midi channels which drives you crazy.

I used something like Midi Pipe on my PC, a little app some guy worked up. It improved things, but it was complicated and technical, and hard to make handshake with the host. Too much money business for me to get involved in it, as Mr. Berry says.

Ah, so you did try something like that. I'm wondering if it's worth a shot to try MIDIPipe and see if it's easier/superior to whatever you had used on PC. I bet I know which one you had tried, and it did look quite convoluted. But not a lot of choice out there though.

[Soundloop]

Good point about the EZ-EG not really designed as a midi controller. Heck, it spits out midi data into a number of separate midi channels which drives you crazy.

I used something like Midi Pipe on my PC, a little app some guy worked up. It improved things, but it was complicated and technical, and hard to make handshake with the host. Too much money business for me to get involved in it, as Mr. Berry says.

I haven't really been following the EZ-EG discussions, but I had the EZ-AG briefly prior to the ztar, and the midi actually worked really well out of the box with logic. From what I had read, I was expecting to have to jump through hoops and filter out a bunch of stuff, use workarounds etc, but I didn't need to at all. I'm wondering if this is sequencer dependant, as logic has a lot of options for velocity filtering etc. A lot of midi controllers will spit to midi channels 1-6 etc (one per string) which isn't a problem if setting input for the channel to "all" or omni.

[Soundloop]

I powered on the YRG and plugged in some headphones to play the internal sounds. Very comfortable to play, but wow, out of the box the internal tracking is glitchy as all hell.. it seems ok for legato (seems like it has potential), but it's obvious that I'll have to do some very serious tweaking on this thing if it's going to be good for anything more than a game controller, but I'm determined to run it through it's paces and see what it can do. I haven't tried midi tracking yet..

[Maruuk]

Good point, Soundloop. I should check and see if have any native midi filtering in my hosts. The EZ-EG needs major re-channelizing and a variety of filtering to prevent spurious notes.

[Maruuk]

Gotta love the Inspired guys over at the official site. Their new line about the thing not working right is: "Well, you're just not playing it right. If the unit is played professionally and cleanly, it will produce satisfactory results. You may have to modify your playing to adapt to the YRG." What an arrogant bunch of BS. They make a POS requiring their market to be their beta testers, then they blame US when it doesn't work.

[JAMES L. HARRISON]

IIRC one of the problems with the EZ is that it sends a low level note on every time a note is fretted by design. You need to filter all note ons below about 20 to avoid the excess triggering.

James
.
.

Good point, Soundloop. I should check and see if have any native midi filtering in my hosts. The EZ-EG needs major re-channelizing and a variety of filtering to prevent spurious notes.

[Maruuk]

Yep, haven't rigged it up in a while but that sounds very familiar!

[Soundloop]

Gotta love the Inspired guys over at the official site. Their new line about the thing not working right is: "Well, you're just not playing it right. If the unit is played professionally and cleanly, it will produce satisfactory results. You may have to modify your playing to adapt to the YRG." What an arrogant bunch of BS. They make a POS requiring their market to be their beta testers, then they blame US when it doesn't work.

Yes, that's pretty ironic since one of the marketing points is that it's a great "guitar" to learn on.

I've been playing for over 24 years, and my technique is both clean and professional.. and right now I would have no idea how to modify my playing to this, unless they mean appplying random spastic pressure velocities to the fretboard and string triggers while playing to try and offset the poor tracking, while at the same time praying to Yngwie Springsteen and hoping for the best..

With the Ztar and G10, you have to adjust your technique slightly and get used to the instrument. With the YRG, I couldn't imagine being a kid trying to learn on this and having any sense of enjoyment at all.. It's a complete kludge as it is, but I'll dig in and try and make some adjustments, I haven't given up. The G10 requires adjustments and setup as well to your playing style, but they designed it that way, so it's a little different. I think the YRG was intended to be setup for playing out of the box.

I can just see some little old kid getting all excited and ready to rock, but first having to boot up the pc and control panel software to make fine tuned adjustments for half an hour just so he can try and learn his favorite riff.. ugh..

Anyway, I'm hoping it gets better once I "fix" it..

[Soundloop]

IIRC one of the problems with the EZ is that it sends a low level note on every time a note is fretted by design. You need to filter all note ons below about 20 to avoid the excess triggering.

James
.
.

Knowing that ahead of time, I believe that when I used it I just set the filter on the midi channel to do that automatically, so there were no problems with it tracking. It felt a bit weird with those buttons, but it worked fine! I guess it just depends if your sequencer has those filtering options..

[Maruuk]

Well there's probably various little freeware apps that could do it, but it's pretty nerdy stuff. And a lot of trial and error. Best if you're either a fellow nerd or you have no life. I don't qualify.