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MIDImorphosis 2 open beta
Hey, folks -- an update coming out for MIDImorphosis 2, which is my pitch-to-MIDI app for guitars. The new version is based off of Rapid Tab (and it's just a rename -- if you've got RT, you'll get this update). After I released Rapid Tab, I found out that this was also a slang name for viagra(!); thus, back to the MIDImorphosis branding!
The new version has faster and more accurate pitch detection, some enhancements to the tab editing, and probably most important, support for AUv3. There's also MIDI control of the app -- MIDI program change or CC messages supported:
PC/CC0 -- toggle on/off pitch-to-MIDI
PC/CC1 -- toggle on/off audio pass-through (for AUv3)
PC/CC2 -- toggle both pitch-to-MIDI and audio
PC/CC3 -- toggle on/off MIDI note recording (main app)
PC/CC4 -- undo for tab editing (main app)
PC/CC5 -- new riff (main app)
The app is in open beta -- sign up with TestFlight if this is your thing. Feedback would be much appreciated.
https://testflight.apple.com/join/RXAxH9i6
Here's an overview video, that covers most of the features. I'm hoping to push it out the door by early February, and it'll go on sale (so don't buy Rapid Tab now if this is something you'd want!).
Comments
That's awesome Patrick
Somehow I missed Rapid Tab... But back in the day I used Midimorphosis a lot running apps without midi to midify them.
ie.: Running figure through it and capturing the output into beatmaker.
Will be glad to revisit my ol' workflow
Hi @SecretBaseDesign. Latency is apparently unavoidable for pitch-to-midinotes software. For live recording/performance, therefore, it can only be used in combination with 'swelling strings' or something similar. That's nice anyway. Thanks to AUV3 we can also easily record notes played with the guitar with a midi recorder app (and play them back later, or 'study' the notes that we played). Also very nice.
I tested MIDImorphosis 2 alongside Midi Guitar 2 (from Jam Origin) (both AUV3) and found the latter to have slightly less latency than the former. Moreover, Midi Guitar 2 has a Polyphonic setting (which works rather well!) and MIDImorphosis 2 doesn't... Could that difference in latency be caused by the perhaps CPU hungry 'animated frequency circle' in MIDImorphosis 2?
NB. I don't think I'll be using the standalone version of MIDImorphosis 2. Nor its tablature options (we have midi recorder apps for that). My suggestion: concentrate on the AUV3 only: try to make it as 'fast' as possible (and hopefully polyphonic too!). The midi control option is a good addition!
Greetings to your cat...
Thanks for making this a free update to Rapid Tab, I look forward to its release. You have a cute cat
Thanks all --
@Harro -- I'd agree that Midi Guitar 2 is pretty darned good, but it's not the app I'm trying to compete with. MG2 is towards the bottom of the App Store sales charts, and hasn't been updated in about 5 years.
If you look at the guitar-oriented apps that are towards the top of the charts, you've got a bunch of tab and sheet music related things. Guitar Pro, Ultimate Guitar, iReal Pro, GuitarTuna, and more. While I get a kick out of driving a synth with a guitar, it's a bit of a novelty. One of my guitars is equipped with a Fishman TriplePlay, which is really fast and accurate -- but I hardly ever use it as a synth controller. If I'm playing a guitar, I mostly want it to sound like a guitar.
As a guitarist, I'm more interested in learning new riffs, and in not losing track of the riffs and chords I've figured out. That's the sort of market I'm hoping to break into -- the guitar player who comes up with something they want to save, and doesn't have the patience to grab a sheet of paper to jot it down. Maybe that's not a big market, but it's what I wanted for myself, and maybe other folks will dig it too!
Oooh I used to love Midimorphosis. Turned the sample and hold on my monophonic Moog Rogue, with the audio fed to MIDI fed to iOS synth, created the most beautiful chord changes and polyphonic key playing for a pop song I’ve ever “done”. So cool. Probably the best unintentional “mistake” I’ve ever made.
Don't think this is only for guitarists to drive synths on the iPad. Now it's an AU, it can be used in an effects slot in AUM to 'capture' audio from an instrument plug-in and feed midi notes to another. I'm finding it particularly good with generative apps - Fundamental / Wotja etc and sending the 'captured' notes to a drone style patch in something like Decent Sampler - the results can be truly amazing.
Thanks @SecretBaseDesign - this will be one I'll be buying on release...
Hi @SecretBaseDesign - do you have a preferred method for feedback on the beta? I've sent a couple of messages from Testflight - is that OK?
Any place you want is good -- I saw the comments over in TestFlight. (And yay, a bug! I normally have the AUv3 open when I'm testing things, and totally missed the glitch you found!)
OK - thanks!
Still have MIDImorphosis installed on my device even though I really haven’t used it much in the last 2 years or so. I’m definitely trying this new app!
At the moment I do not believe that MIDImorphosis 2 (the beta) is intended as a successor to the 'old' MIDImorphosis app. In TestFlight the beta is also called Rapid Tab: a tool (standalone and AUv3) for quick and easy recording of pitch to midi riffs/licks, etc. The new app has mainly improved in that area. The previous MIDImorphosis app is unfortunately not (yet) AUv3, but has more and better controls for pitch to midi conversion: sliders for Tracking Rate, Volume threshold, Midi note velocity, Midi note sesitivity, and buttons for Polyphonic (!), Pitch Bend (!) and Bass Boost. Rapid Tab (MIDImorphosis 2 beta) has none of that! A bit confusing...
Mm2 is a complete rebuild; the original MIDImorphosis was getting to be a tangled mess in terms of the code base, so I decided to wipe the slate clean. The rebuild went much more towards tab transcriptions (hence the Rapid Tab name) -- but it turns out that Rapid Tab is a slang name for Viagra, so I decided to revive the MIDImorphosis name.
The new version has many of the same pitch-to-MIDI controls, but they're not exposed in the UI at the moment. It's a balancing act between UI complexity, and letting people tweak with the things they want to tweak with. I'll probably add an "advanced configuration" tab somewhere, so that those who want to dive in can control more of the pitch-to-MIDI engine. Polyphonic detection is turned off now; with it on, note detection is glitchy. Glitches can often be really interesting musically, but they suck when you're doing transcription. Pitch bend is easy to do; I'll add a control in the advanced config tab for that too.
In short --
MIDImorphosis (original) --> dead
Rapid Tab -> name change into MIDImorphosis 2
Big picture wise, I'm trying to shift focus with the app. There are a number of good pitch-to-MIDI apps out there (MG2 is the obvious one), but there's not a heck of a lot to support guitarists transcribing their playing. Rather than going to head-to-head in a small market, I'm trying to carve out new space in an area that I think can become huge. I think that for every guitarist who wants to control a synth, there are 1000 who want to do something with tablature.
I think an AUv3 version of Viagra would be a big seller
Ironically, considering your focus for the app, I plan to use it for controlling synths with vocals - only had a short play with it so far, but it worked very well, and I appreciate the simplicity of the AUv3 interface. If you add back in the extra controls, from my perspective it would be good to have them only show in a sort of “expert” mode.
I tried it on my 2020 iPhone SE, and I enjoyed it.
Here's my feedback so far:
•The UI doesn't fit on the screen in AUM, and it can't be scrolled. (On my 2020 iPhone SE.)
•Perhaps the Midi On/Off switch should send NoteOff messages upon being disabled, rather than allowing for hanging notes.
•More of a nitpick, but I prefer when a button is designed like "Audio: [On] / Off" rather than displaying the current status of the setting like "Audio On". I think it provides more clarity.
•For people who are using this to create tablature or notation, it might be nice to have a setting which filters out notes that are shorter than a selectable note division, like 1/16. This setting would add a lot of latency, but for people who aren't using it to control a synth, this might be the best way to filter out unintended notes.
Another beta test version is out, with a lot of little fixes. This time, for sure!
Hacked something in that I think guitarists (and other folks) are going to dig. When the app detects a note, it's checking for harmonics of a base frequency. For example, the low E string on a guitar is about 82hz, but it's not just that tone (which would sound like a sine wave). There's also a second frequency at 2 times 82, and 3 times 82, 4 times 82, and so on. (Edit -- I used the star for multiply, and it turned into a font change!) The relative strengths of the frequencies are what make the "tone" of a particular guitar. And here's the part that I think will bake a lot of noodles -- the strength of any particular harmonic is profoundly influenced by the position of the pickup on the string. On my Telecaster, for example, the neck pickup is at exactly at the spot of minimal 4th harmonic movement (on an open string). With the spectral analysis, it's easy to see what frequencies are showing up. I had always sort of known this to be true, but the visualization was eye opening, so to speak.
My Danelectro has the neck pickup at the spot where the 5th harmonic would be on an open string. The two guitars sound absolutely different, but I think the majority of the difference is coming from where the pickups sit (and not tonewood vs. masonite, guitar color, saddle material, etc.).
Anyway, for your amusement, here's a shot quick screen cap of the FFT graph stuff in the AUv3. I'm playing a little KFlay riff with my Danelectro, with audio going through DB Audioware's 20th Anniversary amp sim (my weapon of choice).
Would MIDI control of the ‘hold’ button be possible? @SecretBaseDesign
Yeah, I could add that in. I'll see what I can do next week, still targeting the release at the start of February.
Midimorphosis as audio2midi auv3 is giving me hope for Vocal 2 midi or melodica 2 midi. Started today testing, for experimental usage is Ok.
MM2 is out in the app store, on sale until the end of February.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/midimorphosis-2-tune-tone-tab/id1345154822
One of the big improvements is how the app displays incoming sound. On a guitar, a string vibrates at a base frequency, and also multiples of that base frequency. An "A" is at 110hz, but there are also harmonics at 220, 330, 440, and so on. I'm doing a Fast Fourier Transform, which helps get a more accurate pitch determination, and it's also faster than methods used in normal clip-on tuners (and a lot of simple tuner apps).
The really interesting part -- which became obvious as I was hacking on things -- each of the harmonic frequencies have spots on the string where the amplitude is high, and spots where it's low. These are the "anti-nodes" and "nodes" of a wave. The second harmonic has node at the 12th fret, right in the middle of the string, while the base frequency has an anti-node. Touch lightly at the 12th fret, and the tone change is because you've eliminated the base frequency (110hz, for example), while the 2nd harmonic is unaffected. In the picture I'm attaching below, you'll see the base, 1st harmonic, 2nd, and so on. This is for an app I'm working on (probably something that will go into Spectral Eye, and also an update to MIDImorphosis).
Pluck a guitar string, and you've got all of these harmonic frequencies happening (at various amplitudes). The pickup position, however, is a huge factor in how much is detected. On a Tele, the neck pickup is at a node for the 4th harmonic -- so the 4th harmonic is not detected on this pickup, and that's why the guitar sounds the way it does. Fret at the 5th, and then the 3rd harmonic is gone.
MIDImorphosis shows this happening; I really need to do some YT videos to explain it all, but it is pretty freakin' cool. Guitarists (like me) will yammer on about one woods, bone nuts, brass saddles, and nitro versus poly finish, but I'm now convinced that 90% of tone is just in the physical location of a pickup relative to the scale length. The other 10% is in the hands (and there's some science for that too). And before anyone yells at me, there's another 25% or so, that's other stuff I may wind up talking about. But dang, it's location location location, even for pickups.
It faces some stiff competition though.
Video showing the tuner is now up.
A 15 minute video. To explain the tuner. But it's a good 15 minutes, trust me.
Really impressed using the tab record function today, is it only in the standalone?
Yup -- tab editing/recording is just the main app. Too hard to shoehorn everything into an AUv3 window, which can be dragged and reshaped in a dozen different ways.
Awesome
Cool, great stuff, I’ve yet to load up the MIDI in something else but even just getting the notes down is great!
@SecretBaseDesign I think this will work amazingly well for my altered tunings.. to quickly capture the tab of what I’m playing.. chord shapes etc… it doesn’t have to be accurate for the timing.. I’ll listen back to my recordings, which I always capture first, to figure that out.. or play the timing into a sequencer.. works pretty well with Atom 2 inside of AUM..
If I just change the tuning of a new song to the same as my guitar tuning, I can even play it in using the on screen fretboard.. that’s a very handy feature.. editing the tab is pretty easy too..
I’ve tried using a couple of different music notation apps to accomplish something similar.. it takes time + patience + eventually works.. definitely not easy peasy.. 😁 The final pdfs are quite nice.. everything I need to be able to refresh my memory + play it back..
To be able to export a MIDI, XML, MIDIMorphosis file or a pdf with MM2 is fantastic.. many options to not lose the riff or song..
Thanks for this cool new tool.. 🙏 it’ll be my go to for ALL my altered tuning songs + riffs.. nearly everything I play on my acoustic is altered or open tuning.. transfer that tuning to my Tele to capture it with MM2.. quick + easy.. 🎸
Sold. Lol.
I had my first proper play with this last night to see how the MIDI out worked. I was very pleasantly surprised at the accuracy of pitch detection. Even without any special setup or modifications to my playing, the app was able to track sweep picked notes.
The big advantage I found over something like MIDI Guitar 2 is that I very rarely (like, almost never) got ghost notes, i.e. notes that I did not actually play. I had to go to quite some lengths to try and avoid noise in MIDI output with MG2 but this app is balanced just right to capture the notes being played and filters out the unwanted string noise.
No polyphony or bending options that I have found but that is fine as it does what it does very well. Had a lot of fun playing through GeoShred. I think the note filtering it does helped here as many of the GS instruments are monophonic and so you get a much better experience if you aren’t firing ghost notes at it amongst the ones you actually want to play.
Update just rolled out -- bug fix for changing the tuning on the strings (and that would cause a crash some of time). There's a weirdness with the AUv3 in Cubasis that I need to figure out (seems to hit a number of other AUv3 apps -- so whatever's going sideways for them is also going sideways for me).
Also, YouTuber Jade Starr did a demo that was pretty darned solid, and covered most of the features. App is on sale until the end of the month.
https://www.youtube.com/live/T7pDWujKv74?feature=share&t=840