MIDI Guitars

[Stylus]

Do midi guitars allow pitchslides hammer-ons?
Are they buggy?

[Lunch Money]

From what I understand, tracking for Guitar Synths (as far as I know it's not pure MIDI) has come a long way and is actually playable.

On the other hand, you could just learn keyboard.

Greg

[Lava]

Do midi guitars allow pitchslides hammer-ons?
Are they buggy?

Are you talking about a hexaphonic pickup on a regular guitar which is then connected to a guitar synth?

Or are you talking about an actual guitar midi controller like Starr Labs Z-tar?

[kevink]

Do midi guitars allow pitchslides hammer-ons?
Are they buggy?

Yes, and yes. My current MIDI guitar
interface is a Roland GI-20, with a 10-year-old
GK-2 pickup on an 80's Mexican Strat, and I can
slide and hammer - within limits. You still have
to play pretty darn cleanly, but the tracking has
gotten pretty good. I find using the USB connection
and Roland USB/MIDI driver gives me lower latency
than running the GI-20 MIDI out to my sound card.
The GI-20 has various sensitivity settings,
some of which are better for hammer-ons than
others. Slides seem to be fine on all of them.
There are settings for whether a slide merely
changes the pitch of a note, or sends a new
MIDI note (and thus a new envelope trigger, etc.)
at each half-step of the slide.

You can hear a pretty crude example (it's entirely
first takes and looped improvisations) of what can
be done with it at
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/5/thekrellmusic.htm
on the tune "Evasion". All the synth/sampler tracks
and loops were originated with the GI-20, and the
doubled Guitar/violin was done by recording the
guitar audio and MIDI at the same time, then
driving Kontakt with the MIDI track.