Jam Origin MIDI Guitar Officially Released, Along with a Bass Version

Jam Origin’s MIDI Guitar software has been around for quite a while in not-quite-final versions, but they’ve been slowly counting their version upwards and 1.0 is finally here, in tandem with a new MIDI Bass counterpart.

It’s some fancy software, for sure. I’d long walked the seedy ghettos of midi guitar but eventually gave it up. I had Roland internal and external GK-2A pickups and used GR-30, GR-33, and GR-20 synths at various times. They were always fun to mess around with but the tracking was never acceptable for live performances. And if you’re going to just use them for recordings, well then why not just skip the tracking issues and program the synth parts exactly how you want them? So they became novelties that I eventually grew out of. I did get some extra mileage out of the pickups via Roland’s VG-88 processor, but that’s another tale.

MIDI Guitar, the official product by Jam Origin, and not generic Midi guitar with a lower case “G,” does away with most of that mess. It’s entirely software-based. You line in your shred machine with your interface of choice and your PC/Mac/iOS device does the work. And it works as well as a hardware midi pickup, I’ll give it that. The usual open-note fussiness is still the biggest annoyance, and it’ll sometimes pick up on note harmonics you didn’t intend, but I was impressed that full chords were detected with little latency.

There’s free trial software at Jam Origin’s website if you want to give it a test run by your lonesome.