The Yamaha EZ-EG Guitar Midi Controller Thread

[NorthSouth]

Anyone want to sell me their Yamaha Ez-Eg? (not AG)

Or perhaps know where I can get one in Europe?

Cheers,
bagginz

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Brand-New-Yamaha- ... dZViewItem

http://health-beauty.search.ebay.co.uk/ ... acatZ31414

LOL

[Markleford]

Wow! Marc, Thanks for the fast reply.

Yeah, he's The Man. It's his ActiveX control that I use, after all!

(And honestly, I haven't even considered upgrading to Vista yet.)

- m

[bagginz]

Anyone want to sell me their Yamaha Ez-Eg? (not AG)

Or perhaps know where I can get one in Europe?

Cheers,
bagginz

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Brand-New-Yamaha- ... dZViewItem

Thanks but that's an AG and therefore not what I asked.

Cheers,
Bagginz

[spuddle]

AG > EG

[stayne]

No no, let him vent.

[TheProphetX]

Aight, let me tell you all what I did, you'll get a kick outta this considering how hard it is to find a EZEG now a days.. I stumbled onto this forum about 2 days ago and read 40 or so pages of the thread... after seeing the video of Markelford play the EZ I was convienced I HAD TO HAVE ONE.

The search began on Ebay and everywhere I could think of to get one of these, AN EZEG to be specific, should'nt be to hard I thought, I'm in Hollywood CA, Land of the Pawn Shop.

After 1 day of searching ... I FOUND one on CRAIGSLIST.org for only $50 bucks Brand new with all accessories!!! Can you believe it, this guy just posted it for sale like an hour before I started looking for it. (He obviously had no idea what he was selling)

ONLY $50.00 BUCKS!!!

So I am now the newest member of our lil' "EZ RIDERZ" group. I feel like I know you all since I just read 88 pages of posts in two days!!!

Marc and Markelfold, hats off to you both, I'm gonna name a song after you!!! (a song is kinda like a child right?)

Now for the set up... and the issues..

I'm running Midi Yoke on a custom P4 into Reason 3.0. I got everything running right using Markelford's App since Marc's is missing in action..(And I was sooo excited to see how them scales worked Marc, where you at?).

I have tried it both with the App and without and I think I have some latency issues WITH the App that disappear when I use it unmodded. To clarify if I just plug it in and run it with Reason without opening Markelforlds App its very very tight timing... but when I open the App, its a lil slow in response timing.

Any Ideas???

[Markleford]

Hrm, I've used just about that setup live before and didn't find it too bad. Then again, people have different tolerances for latency, and apparently mine is pretty high! Mind, any intermediary app will introduce a little latency, no matter what.

It's very hard to diagnose latency problems, too, as it's very setup dependent. One thing to do is make sure that no other apps are using the MIDI Yoke ports: just have them enabled in the EZ-app and Reason. Also, make sure that MIDI-OX isn't running in the background as well, as that could be doing some sort of filtering/monitoring tricks than might slow the port down.

Now, I've never used the EZ straight into Reason 3. Typically I'll go through SONAR instead and use ReWire to route the sound from Reason, so maybe there's a fortunate driver combination happening there. Or perhaps it's because of the ReMote Controller Surface behind the scene magic: who knows, maybe it's trying to analyze something that's not there?

So, I'm pretty much no help here. Just make sure that you start out with as little stuff running as possible to begin with and observe how the system slows down as you add things. For instance, you could first just watch the fret indicators in the EZ-App to see if the reaction is immediate. Then you might try routing the output to a *different* MIDI device than Reason, just to compare the latency and see if the increase is specific to Reason.

Good luck, and congrats on the great find!

- m

[TheProphetX]

Thanks!! for your reply and those are good ideas, i think it had somehing to do with what program started first. Now I fire up the EZ-APP then Reason and it works great with very very low latency. Also i customized the FRETBOARD setting in the EZ-APP to standard Guitar tuning and then raised velocity to the max but left it so that the strings are not generating any midi notes when plucked, (no open strings either).

What that allows me to do is Pick the strings like normal so it feels like i'm playing Guitar but all the midi notes are generated entirely from the fretboard... this is working great so far with no latency or double triggers or problems and i can play as fast as i want with no problems. This is a good alternative to plucking the strings and having them mute all the notes in regualr guitar mode cause the pluck generates a midi event then th epressingof the fret overrides that event and creates a mute, so my sequencer was full of muted notes.

So i have just one other question Markleford... what about the scales??? is that option available in your App? Can it be? I would really like to get that going...

[Markleford]

So i have just one other question Markleford... what about the scales??? is that option available in your App? Can it be? I would really like to get that going...

Not currently available. I suppose it *could* have scales: really, all kinds of features are possible! The big problem, though, is that I haven't been actively developing on it for a while (over a year now). Too many ideas, too little time.

The biggest concept that I wanted to pull off was to make this a user-codable system, so that just about anyone could write little "scriptlets" that are triggered on specific events. If I boil down all the essential dirty work and seal it behind an easy to use interface, then it could be left in the hands of users to make their own mods to share as a community. That was the eventual goal.

But again, no time! No time!

Perhaps someday I should ask for an official count of "my users": maybe that would be motivating. So far as I know, there's only maybe 7 people (tops) that use my system, and they've been happy with the little fixes I'd made a while back. Unfortunately the EZ-*G series never really took off, so we have less people in our little gang than we'd like!

- m

[TheProphetX]

Yup i understand, and it would be great to be able to do it on the user side of it, but it does take a lot of time, i know you been working on this all for a couple years now, and i'm getting in at the end of the hype, but to me its all brand new and amazing, see i'm a guitar player at heart of 14 years, but started playing keyboards just to get the ideas down into a sequencer, (I produce Hip Hop) but now that i can really control my midi with the "knowledge" of a guitar such as the techniques and hand positionings, it has breathed NEW life into my playing and ideas.

So let me know how much it will cost me to get a version with scales in it that will light up my fretboard, (dont get me wrong, i dont have a ton of money but i do know that things that take time should be paid for and i'm sure i will be using this App as my everyday mainstay in the studio so i would like to have it "comfortable... and the scales will make it very comfortable!!

For instance make 2 drop down boxes in the GUI one for the key and one for the type of scale, then once selected, say for instance E minor scale, it will make the notes light up acrossed the fret board and only those frets stay lit. Great for soloing or looking for a note my ear cant seem to find.

oh and after reading the 88 pages of the forum i think there are WAAAAY more then 7 people using your App.

[Markleford]

Well, I'll certainly put light-up scales on my mental to-do list. Of course, that will require another output port in my app! And even if you're serious about paying, I have no idea what would be fair to charge.

Incidentally, I came from a keyboard background, but also played guitar and bass. Later, I'd actually played Chapman Stick in a band for a while, which combined the techniques nicely. This is why most of my own playing on the EZ is geared toward two-handed tapping, which it's perfect for!

Anyway, cool that you got the latency issue figured out. Have fun!

- m

[ltf3]

Hi

I just got an EXEG from Amazon.com. So cool!

Like many the whole Note Off thing is difficult and I see several mentions of tools to refine the operation of the device. Are there any that can be run from OSX on a Mac?

Thanks so much for any info.

Lee
^

[TheProphetX]

I understand, i know its a lotta work... well i guess i will give Marc's App and try and see how it holds up... and i ust got all my latency issues fixed too, really hate to swithc over when everything is going well on it. Le meknow if you come up with anything Markel... and maybe you should take a count of how many are running your App..

[loneguitarist]

Hey everyone - I'm in the UK and I'm looking to get an EZ-EG, I've found a shop in the states that will ship one over for me. I'm a mac user but I use windows as well for FLstudio, and I would really like to use Mark's EZ-EG script for converting the sysex messages to midi note-on commands but the terrible internal midi routing of windows does nothing but annoy me. My first question is, can I use a midi cable loop to replace the midi yoke application, i.e. take the midi output of the EZ-guitar environment and loop it back into another midi port on my interface? My second question is, is there any mac equivalent of Marks program? And my third and final question is, is there any program or hardware that could take note-on commands of a particular velocity (i believe the fretted but unpicked notes on the EZ-EG are 14-velocity) and change the velocity etc. - some kind of midi filter application I guess.

Sorry about all the questions

Thanks everyone

[_starcraft_]

sorry just a basic question that i do not see answered on the yamaha site.....can i do mute chords with this one?(thinkin of buyin the AG)

edit: found the answer in the first post seem it does mute chords ok.