sonuus User Forum

The basic question is: can a pitch to midi converter be used on a electric or electro-acoustic hurdy gurdy?

We're planning on building a electric hurdy gurdy. ( no soundbody, think electric guitar) The pickups will probably be three K&K pickups, one for the melody strings, one for the buzzing string, one for the drone strings.
The goal is to be able to trigger other sounds through midi while playing the hurdy ==> for instance playing the hurdy, but hearing a hurdy plus for instance a bagpipe.

Th HG produces three sounds: melody, drones and the sound of a rhytmic buzzing string. all these three sound together. Does one pitch to midi converter do the trick, or will we need more (3)

I sincerely hope you know what a hurdy gurdy is, if not you can find one of my instruction videos here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft4Si9Cd2EU

cheers,


Pieter Lauwers

I am not sure how well MIDI conversion would work. It depends how well you can separate the different parts of the sound.

MIDI conversion relies on pitch-detection, which requires well-defined pitches. The current Sonuus products are monophonic, so they assume only one note is being played. This has the advantage of very fast detection.

You have three pickups, so it may be possible to do pitch-detection on these individually.

Some questions for you:

What does it sound like from each pick-up?

The melody, buzzing and drone strings: how many strings are being played for each note? Is it like a piano where there are two or three strings per note, or is it like a guitar: one string per note. If there is only one string playing for each pickup, that makes things more possible.

Are the strings excited by a wheel -- like a bow on a violin?