Riaan wrote:
Alan, I guess the natural sound of the guitar shouldn't have any influence on the quality of the eventual MIDI generated sound?
Unfortunately it does. While it doen't affect the quality of the synth sound directly, it affects the quality of the Pitch to MIDI conversion process. Pitch to MIDI conversion is a tricky bit of technical wizardry at the best of times and quite a few factors affect the process adversely. Some of these are related to the quality of the guitar, some to the style of instrument and some are down to how it is played.
Specifically:
Pitch stability is important (you don't want to accidentally bend the notes in a piano sound, believe me), and while a floppy floating trem is desirable on some guitars and in some styles of music, it's usually avoided on a MIDIguitar because of this.
Also you don't want too much resonance, as the extra natural reverb can mess with the pitch recognition side of the conversion, making it "glitch" (triggering false or "ghost" notes or sometimes even getting the wrong note altogether), slowing down the conversion and in some cases creating so much extra MIDI data that it can be too much for some MIDI devices to handle. So while a Benedetto archtop is a great instrument for Jazz guitar, it doesn't make a great platform for a MIDIguitar system.
Notes must ring cleanly, with strong fundamental tones and less overtones, which means that any guitar with cheaper construction that has wolf tones, odd resonances, dead spots or fret buzz is going to cause problems. This unfortunately rules out a lot of cheaper guitars (or at least makes them worse) as MIDIguitars.
So does it then make sense to build a guitar without worrying about it's natural sound, specifically for this?
It helps, yes. The extreme examples of a MIDIguitar only approach aren't really guitars (Starr Labs Z-Tar, SynthAxe, etc), but are guitar-shaped midi controllers (there's no conversion process, they are digital instruments), because that is the only real way to get completely accurate and fast performance. But most of us want something that still feels, plays and sounds like a normal guitar too, so a compromise is usually struck (like Godin guitars, who even have acoustic models).
I'm perfectly happy using a hardtail, through-neck guitar with less resonance than I usually go for, because the loss in complexity in the guitar's sound is more than made up for by the added range of sounds and tonal layering options I have with magnetic, piezo and synth sounds at my disposal.
