I want to record some midi bass lines and thought the easiest way would be strap on the Roland GK-3B pickup to a regular bass.

Has anyone tried it or have another way?

Davo

The easiest way is to play the lines on a keyboard and use the quantize function to get them in time.

If your keyboard skills can't do that, enter the notes in one at a time.

the GK-3B will only work if you also have a Roland GR or VG unit. It is not a MIDI device in and of itself, but simply a pickup designed to transmit a signal directly to a proprietary Roland GR (synth) or VG (effect) unit such as the GR-20 or VB-99. They also make a unit that will convert the signal to MIDI signal for use with a regular rack synth (or keyboard) Unless you have one of those units, the GK is useless.
Like Jeremy said... you are much better off using a keyboard.
The Roland units are EXPENSIVE... awesome, extremely versatile and powerful, but expensive.

DX

Seek out the one who is most green.

[I think greenboy has been active on TB as of late.]

Pretty good advice here, too. I mean, if all you want is a device that enters MIDI into a computer for studio work, a MIDI keyboard is hard to beat.

Are you looking for something for live performance?

It's to record bass lines into my Roland drum kit TD12. So I can play along to them. I agree the keyboard is a more obvious route, but the whole feel of my playing is lost and quantizing may not do it.

I don't really want more gear that's for sure. I've also heard of audio to midi conversion software such as:

digital-ear

They all seem to cost about $100.

Davo

that software looks great, but you will still need the (expensive) hardware interface to get the signal from the bass to the MIDI application. I don't know if I'd trust the accuracy of that particular application outright, though. To do it right I'd still want the hardware interface like GK-3B + GI-20... Unfortunately there is no cheap solution to get your true blue, as-played bass lines into MIDI format. If you don't have a MIDI keyboard, a cheap used 25 key MIDI controller such as the M-AUDIO Oxygen or E-MU Xboard or even the *AHEM* Behringer U-Control would do the trick nicely... just hang a strap on it and sling it low and sideways to get your wrist into it... so you can get some of that 'feel' back...


DX

That's beautiful I can just picture it.

Actually thanks to the Logic Users Group, Logic can actually do this. I did it last night. I took a straight audio track, which is .aif incidentally, and using an impossible to comprehend sequence involving transposing the audio to the score music and then into midi. On playback it was very close. A few quick edits and it was ready. BUT. Now I'm stuck because I need a .mid or .midi file. So I'll keep you posted.

Davo

Band in a Box has a wave to midi function. It works OK.

File - export?

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2019527&tstart=0

Thanks Tim