Guitar control for TJ instruments?

guitarchitect · Post by **guitarchitect** » Thu Nov 24, 2011 1:02 am

Is there any way to have direct guitar input control the TJ instruments? I like the mic input control feature on the new v2.0 and have tried playing guitar thru the mic to play TJ's instruments. This works OK and is very cool, but could a Apogee Jam connected guitar be made to somehow work as input to trigger the TJ arsenal?
What about using the Alesis iODock....any better possibilities there?
I have a Roland guitar synth now and hoping TJ could possibly get close to doing something similar.

Post by **Jesse** » Fri Nov 25, 2011 10:58 am

They should in theory work, as iOS usually automatically picks the input that is used, but as I don't have either the Apogee Jam, or ioDock, I can't say exactly. When I've tried it with the edirol UA-1ex USB audio device and the camera connection kit on an ipad the input and output works fine.

gregjon · Post by **gregjon** » Wed Nov 30, 2011 4:00 am

I was playing around with TJ myself while trying to record guitar with a loop with my guitar with Ampkit connector and I thought I was hearing things, but it was playing the instruments.
I have a Roland Gr-55 and was really surprised I was able to track with the TJ without a 13 pin pickup!
Still trying to figure out how to record the guitar but I can just paste the loop into something else.
I liked being able to paste my drums into a loop as well.

Maybe some advice on how to get a little better tracking would be nice. This feature alone would have got me to buy the TJ and I did not know it was there!
I can only play one note at a time cleanly, but I like to fake bass sometimes and this will really come in handy with my 2 man band!

Thanks

Greg

Post by **Jesse** » Wed Nov 30, 2011 10:35 am

Yeah, the mic input control mode is monophonic only, as you discovered, and currently is better suited for voice or wind instrument input, rather than something with a sharp transient. It also can be a little twitchy, but I decided that quick response was more important than a totally smoothed one. I may add a smoothing/averaging control to let you tweak that as well.... it just won't track as fast.

As for recording your guitar, you just need to do a Mic Record, and it should take the input from your ampkit connector.

gazgoldstar · Post by **gazgoldstar** » Wed Nov 30, 2011 5:01 pm

I have an Apogee Jam and have got TJ tracking pretty well with it. I have had a couple of weird things happen though such as losing the sound altogether and the most bizarre one, the headphone jack not working neccessitating a reboot. I don't know why this happened but wonder if it is a little unstable to use with the Jam? I will try it out again and report back if the stability issue returns.

guitarchitect · Post by **guitarchitect** » Mon Dec 05, 2011 11:42 am

I spent some time with my guitar plugged into an Apogee Jam interface into iPad. With TJ's mic input control enabled I was able to play (and record) all of the TJ instruments! Check it out!

This is a great feature for guitar players. Some instruments respond better that others and I had some problems that forced a reboot. Strings and synth sounds play great...low latency. Had some squeals and noises pn some sounds, playing with Threshold and Glide controls to tweak each sound helps.
Interestingly, when set to a non-chromatic scale, notes played on guitar that are not within chosen scale are not played...they default to closest in-scale note. Nice...no bad notes!

Jesse, if there's any way to change the mic input to be polyphonic that would be great!

guitarchitect · Post by **guitarchitect** » Sun Dec 11, 2011 2:36 pm

The ability for guitar players to control & record the arsenal of great-sounding TJ instruments is HUGE!
works great with Apogee Jam interface and the iO Dock. Like a Roland guitar synth for a fraction of the cost!

Only thing missing is polyphonic input...Jesse, is this possible in future upgrades?

Post by **Jesse** » Sun Dec 11, 2011 2:49 pm

You might have guessed that extracting polyphonic pitch info from an audio stream is a pretty big leap from monophonic, especially with decent accuracy. I know that TC electronics has their Polytune (hardware stompbox and iphone app), but that is probably a cheat because they are listening for specific pitches (the 6 strings, however you have it configured) and can take some interesting shortcuts.

So, unless I stumble upon some way to do it that doesn't break the CPU processing bank, I don't think I'll be pursuing it in the near future. You never know, though!

This is why all the real midi guitar tech does things on a per-string basis.

guitarchitect · Post by **guitarchitect** » Wed Jan 11, 2012 8:03 pm

I just purchased the You Rock Guitar, an new, inexpensive guitar midi controller... http://www.yourockguitar.com/products/you-rock-guitar

Has anyone used one of these to control TJ instruments via TJ's core midi options?
Works great with controlling GarageBand instruments and hoping will work with TJ but I hooked it up to TJ but was unable to get any sound or instrument control...any ideas what I may be doing wrong?

Post by **Jesse** » Thu Jan 12, 2012 12:18 am

You need to go to TJ's Prefs->Midi Control , turn Use CoreMidi to ON, then scroll down and find the MIDI Input Connections and you should see an entry there for it, which you need to turn on. If you don't see an entry, try killing TJ and starting it again while the usb device is plugged in to your ipad.

I haven't tried it with that device, but the above are the general instructions for getting external USB midi devices talking.....
Just to be clear, you got it working with the iPad version of garageband, right?