Anyone interested in an open-source pitch-to-MIDI converter?

hexaphone Frets: 0
06 Nov, 2024
Recently Joel de Guzman from cycfi.com has offered to start a new open-source hardware project to build a pitch-to-MIDI converter.

This would be similar to the Roland GI-20 or the electronics of the Fishman TriplePlay, but with fewer issues.  It would support up to 8 channels.

He has already spent years developing the pitch and onset detection software for his nu-multi pickups and he's offering to do the groundwork for the open hardware device too, but first he's checking to see if there is community interest.

So far only 19 people have 'added a star' to the project and I guess Joel might be a bit disheartened by that, so if you are interested in MIDI guitar then please reach out to him or give him a boost.

The project page is here:

I am not involved with Joel's work, but have followed his blog for years and am a fan of what he's creating.  You might already be familiar with his Infinity Guitar and Thor.  For more than twenty years he's also been making major contributions to open source software projects including the Q audio DSP library and the Boost libraries.

Joel has written on his blog about finding it hard to keep up the passion for open source when he's missing the community involvement.  I'm hoping we can give him the support he needs to keep the enthusiasm going.
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susbemol Frets: 483
09 Nov, 2024
It's great to hear more people are looking to explore such a niche market but unless he's already got something revolutionary that he hasn't talked about yet, it's quite difficult to imagine how this new venture might result in something better than what is already available.

The Fishman Tripleplay is built from decades of research that has been worked on by multiple companies over the years.

Offering an alternative solution, JamOrigin's MIDI Guitar HEX is also very impressive and uses common hardware along their clever software implementation.
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hexaphone Frets: 0
10 Nov, 2024
Oh, I didn't know about the a new addon for JamOrigin that uses a hexaphonic pickup.  It does look impressive.

I think Joel's overall goal is to make features like infinite sustain and divided per-string pickups more compelling to use musically, and less niche and proprietary.

At this stage it's not clear how the performance of his pitch/onset/offset detection compares to the existing options.  He has been working on it for about seven years, so his software is much younger than either JamOrigin or the TriplePlay technology.  Perhaps he's made enough of a breakthrough with autocorrelation for it to be competitive.

At the moment I have two TriplePlay devices -- the Connect and the wireless one -- both have firmware issues that bug me, the hardware is not lasting well, and they're difficult to repair.  Even if Joel's initial pitch-to-MIDI converter doesn't have the very best performance, it would be good to have an open-source option to compete.

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