Sonuus B2M howz it working for U?

[bassbrad]

Just wondering if any members are using the Sonuus B2M and what your results are. I am asking because the electronica project seems to be taking off a bit and I'd really like to trigger some sounds from bass instead of keys.

[fokof]

Search is your friend

Purchased Sonuus B2M Bass Midi Interface

[bassbrad]

I had already searched but didn't find any success stories. I was hoping for other input.

[bigchiefbc]

I am going to be using it at a gig in about a week to control a few synth patches with my bass. In rehearsals so far, I'd say that it isn't flawless (i.e. you do get a glitch here and there), but in general it does work good enough to use in that environment. I'll have a more detailed review on it after the gig.

[bigchiefbc]

So I played a gig this past Monday night, and I used the B2M for sections of 4 songs, to control patches on an Access Virus.

My review of its performance is pretty similar to my earlier thoughts on it. It does occasionally glitch, but I was able to get the glitch rate down to probably 5% or so. Roll off your tone knob, make sure you mute the other strings, control your volume to make sure you're not clipping (it has a clip light). Also, I tried it with a compressor, and found that it caused more glitching (probably because of the extraneous string and fret noise being made louder), so stay away from compressors with this thing. Overall, I'm happy with it, especially for a quite reasonable price.

[yuro]

It is no more than a toy for me cause it is not acurate enough... I´m always trying to go midi but all aquipment for now makes me sad... I have few keyboards also and knows about midi... It just paynfull to keep all variables in the right place so this device works a little bit... but as a toy to hear some slow executed pad sounds from your synth, is great...

[gastric]

The Sonuus B2M isn't useful live for normal or fast playing. They've nailed the latency issue with super fast tracking. Velocity tracking seems excellent. However, the pitch tracking is extremely flakey. It will pick wrong notes frequently, and more annoying it has serious ghost/retrigger issues where you'll play a single note but it will trigger a few NOTE ON/OFF sequences quickly. The wrong notes I could probably learn to deal with, but when it sends 3 NOTE ON events for a single note it screws up envelopes and what not.

Note you can hear all of these issues in the YouTube video linked here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc8FbTKqgfs Wrong notes, doubled/trippled notes, all of it.

But they've nailed the latency. It's absolutely playable in that regard.

I was having some good success using the B2M to control effects with Velocity and Note data. I'd set my software, Plogue Bidule as my VST host, and could set a keyboard split (which ghost/retriggers don't affect, though grossly wrong notes would) from the B2M output to do channel switching and toggle effects in real-time, or use Velocity data to control VST parameters as the Velocity output seemed very solid and responsive, though sometimes a little hot so I'd have to use a velocity scaler to keep too many of the notes from peaking at 127.

But using it to trigger VST synth like Massive for awesome electro-dance bass wasn't working at all for me. Way too glitchy.

Related to all of my adventures, free VST audio-to-synth apps like FrettedSynth GuitarSynSE was much, Much, MUCH more usable as it tracks pitch directly, thus no MIDI necessary. It has issues tracking latency properly, so I'd feed it a heavily gated and squashed/controlled input. But the tracking and sounds are excellent, as is latency. Korg Legacy MS-20 tracks pitch as well, though I found that VST overall to be less useful due to the sounds it produces.