Bob Dubery wrote
My belief has been that the way to use a guitar with MIDI is to use it to play guitar-ish things. It doesn't work for, say, harmonica or string section sounds
On the contrary Bob. The sounds with slower attack work best with MIDIguitar - strings pads, slower horn ensemble sounds. Percussive sounds (including piano and many guitar sounds) are the hardest to pull off. The true test of a any MIDIguitar and converter is how they handle piano sounds.
This is largely due to the nature of the guitar to MIDI conversion process, which suffers from a slight latency (the sound has to happen on the guitar first, before it can be recognised and turned into MIDI). The latency also gets larger the lower the note involved. Also because of the vagaries of the conversion process and difficulty of turning guitaristic techniques into MIDI, note glitches are common, which sound horrible with many percussive sounds. One exception is Hammond sounds, where the glitches actually go some way to make a more realistic performance, mimicing the wild way that a lot of the Hammond players approach the instrument.
Add to this that a MIDIguitar in part dictates the way you play - strumming just does not work and the most success is found using more precise playing techniques (which explains why players like McLaughlin, Morse and Guthrie can pull off really fast clean runs with fairly percussive sounds).
You could try to pluck, not strum, to get the timing closer to keyboard?
Nail on the head Gearhead - that's exactly what you do. Fingerstyle works well, both arpeggiated and all plucked together. Depending on the sound used, you can get away with some strumming type things occasianally.
