Jamstik studio guitar

VCV Rack
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I took your challenge and made this quick patch. It’s very simple and silly but I can already see programming very creative stuff with this.

I made this short simple note sequence. other then sending pitch and gate to both elements, I’m using the midi to gate module to control -

  1. B3 note triggers BURST that sends pitch and cv to Additive Vibration
  2. Two other notes trigger Entrian drums, which I think creates this interesting rhythm when triggered by the guitar playing. of course it needs more tweaking to really work and not get boring.
  3. B3 also triggers an AD envelope to control the Laterlus’s cutoff.

Really need to start exploring this, thanks! (Also, as you can hear, it’s not very forgiving when it comes to sloppy playing lol)

I used the VCV Midi-CV in mono btw, didn’t use the MPE. It still works for slides and even pitchbends although it’s very sensitive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87tvv1zQ3aA

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It won’t change your playing style, but it’s def made me own up to my shortcuts and sloppiness, which I guess is a good thing lol

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I pulled mine out tonight to re-test, and it lives up to my memory, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with it. The MPE really makes a world of difference. The other thing I recommend is do play around with the sounds in Jamstik Creator, those really showed me what I should be able to achieve in other apps.

My playing style is very light, I like to use my index finger to brush the strings like western african players, so I really cranked the sensitivity of the hex pickup by getting it close to the strings, using the Jamstik Creator app to check levels. And I could play as normal without a pick with no problem.

This worked quite well, except I would get some little ghost notes in VCV much higher up in the fingerboard than I was playing. I basically never heard them in Jamstik Creator, but I could hear really audibly in VCV Rack.

It turned out that they were very low in velocity, so by implementing velocity correctly in VCV, they mostly went away. I also made a max patch that stood in-between which could be set to filter out any notes that were not in the scale or the octave areas that I was playing for a particular part. This basically eliminated any issues that I had for getting midi recordings of even rather strange parts that were full of hammer-ons and pull-offs.

I need to restring my jamstik studio, as the strings have gotten corroded since I last picked it up. but even in that state I was quite impressed with it again tonight.

If you are accustomed to playing with a pick, I don’t think the ghost notes are as much of a problem. If memory serves, I raised the hex pickup on mine much more than the manual recommends. But even so, I was quite surprised by how well it worked.

I also often play with a capo and it doesn’t seem to have any problem with that.

Oh, I’m just updating from firmware version 3.15 to 3.22, and it looks like in the notes they eliminated a lot of unwanted notes, so hopefully it’s even better than I remembered.

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Thanks Dan. Those are good suggestions. I look forward to receiving my Jamstik next week.

I’m hoping we all can share some patches here.

I bet OrangeLine Fence could be used for filtering out high harmonic triggering.

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Another tip that might be obvious is when using it with VSTs, you need to change the pitch bend values in the jamstik software to match the values of the plugin for it to work correctly

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How easy (or difficult) is that to do? Are those changes made from the Jamstik or from the Jamstik host software?

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It’s a simple value change in Jamstik Creator which is the host software. Most VSTs should mention their pitch bend specs in the manual, if the natural capability exists.

You’ll find yourself tweaking in the host software mostly MPE on/off and Multi/Single Midi Channels modes to adjust to different VSTs. Especially the orchestra ones. With VCV and with Bitwig MPE devices especially, it works perfectly almost straight out of the box for me.

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I’m always learning something from this group :slight_smile: I had no idea about changing the values in the Jamstik Creator App. As you said, everything with the Jamstik just seems to work “out of the box”.

Having said that, I couldn’t see any real differences when adjusting the settings in the app within VCV when using the “PW” output from the MIDI-CV module. I did however go back and change the module to MPE mode, polyphony 16 channels and the responsiveness is better.

For the modulation, I replaced “Punch” with Submarine AO-101 and am multiplying by 50.

Works great now!

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I also just noticed that choice of pick makes a big difference to the responsiveness. The best response I got was with a Jim Dunlop .60mm nylon. The worst response was a 1.5mm pick I use when playing the mandolin.

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30

I restrung my jamstik tonight, although with new gauge strings and I didn’t fully calibrate it, so I think the high strings are a little lower in volume than I’d like, but I did two videos. One of the patch I made when I was first testing it with vcv rack, and then the second with the jamstik creator lead guitar sound.

This one was a way to implement volume, and the polyscopes illustrate some of the various MPE CV signals:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hine8vq75l18o2f/jamstik%20demo%202023-04-20%20at%2011.42.08%20PM.mov?dl=0

And then this second one is just jamstik creator and one of their lead guitar sounds, I was using my imac microphone for this one because I didn’t have a loopback for the video recorder. (Also, my guitar playing is a bit rusty in both of these, so some of the missed notes are me not striking the note hard enough, and partly due to needing to calibrate to these heavier gauge strings.)

But I wanted to show off the way it picks up hammer on/offs and open strings and can follow along with rapid flurries of notes, the midi data is the same quality as what VCV Rack was receiving, but this voice is a little better tuned to take advantage of it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jruw4ilsos7ad5t/jamstik%20creator%20demo%202023-04-20%20.mov?dl=0

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The first video is showing the following in my Windows Firefox browser:

image

The 2nd video is great and really shows off the triggering and tracking of the Jamstik. Sounds very good.

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Same here, the first one played but with no sound. The second one sounds great!

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Hm, that’s strange, they’re both the same filetype and it’s just a dropbox link, but must be having some browser issues. I added a direct link to the dropbox location, if that helps.

I’ll have to figure out how to upload to youtube next time.

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That worked. Thanks.

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When I click the link, the video is very low quality, but if you download it you should be able to see the patching in case it’s useful later.

The Scale module on the right is able to adjust the volume setting.

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I received my Jamstik Studio MIDI guitar yesterday. I already have it set up as a sitar in VCV Rack, using the Vult Opulus Sitar2 preset for the played sitar strings and the Vult Rescomb2 resonant comb filter with 12 sympathetic resonator strings times 2 for 2 ocatves. Sounds very good so far.

This is the same setup I used in my recent Seaside Modular Proteus Ahir Bhairav pseudo-raga patches and recordings.

It is really amusing that I now realize that the fret board patterns I used to play sitar-ish melodies on the electric guitar and acoustic banjo in the 70’s were actually Indian scales and most likely Ahir Bhairav :grinning:

This is going to be fun when I add in the Jawari and Tala and drone.

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Congrats, sounds like fun! I’ll be interested in hearing how it compares with your other midi guitar experiences when you feel you’ve got a feel for it :slight_smile:

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I can already say the Jamstik is by far the best of the 4 MIDI guitars I have owned over the past ~30 years. I think I have MPE string bends working correctly with VCV Rack. But, in MPE mode, VCV is not recognizing the low pitch E string notes. Has anyone observed an issue with Jamstik and VCV MPE compatibility? I suspect this may be something related to the MPE “first channel” standard being 2. Ah, if I change the VCV poly channels to 7, it works!

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Glad you were able to solve the problem!

I’ve felt the same way, I haven’t been able to try enough different midi guitars, but I’ve worked on a fret scanner which is quite a good approach, but very demanding on the design aspect and quite finicky, and we were never able to bring it to market. It would have been a modern update of the Zeta Mirror 6.

I was impressed with one of the AI approaches called Jam Origin, but I wasn’t satisfied with the latency limitations of having computer software doing the conversion. Though I think the AI approach is very promising in the long run. They aren’t even using a hex pickup for that, and it’s very good.

I’m not sure what Jamstik is doing, whether they’re using AI or just a nice fast audio processor in their devices. If they’re not using AI after the hex pickup, I would think that addition would probably be the next generation of improvement.

But whatever Jamstik is doing, with the addition of the MPE support, it’s a really nice playing experience.

I think there’s probably also a benefit to capo’ing up the neck a bit so that the low notes are faster sounding and easier for the conversion software to clock, and then controlling the octave output in the midi settings.

Did you get the jamstik studio, or their new classic version with the regular headstock? I’m curious if that one is as good as the original studio version.

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I got the Studio model. It took me a while to get the hang of tuning the Studio. My left hand automatically reaches for the headstock tuners. It remains to be seen how the Studio tuning scheme works out over time.

Off topic, my 2014 Gibson Les Paul Signature Edition has “ETune” motorized tuning or manual tuning. Turns out I don’t care for the motorized tuning approach. So, I paid for what I did not need. But, getting out on the cutting edge of innovation is often messy.

Further off topic, as I prepared for my 2018 retirement, I was doing a lot of work with various CPUs, MPUs and the like, as I was going to do advanced hardware music projects. One of those boards was an NVIDIA Jetson board which was a massively parallel GPU enabled:

I was going to use it for A.I. and other advanced techniques such as GP-GPU Fourier transforms on audio signals, much as I did with my 14 channel EEG headset on my NVIDIA Tesla based supercomputer I built in 2009. I did 14 channel FFT massively parallel real-time spectral analysis of the brainwaves.

Alas, VCV Rack came along and distracted me :wink:

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