Double Bass Bowable, Midi Out, Cello Bass Recommendations

[hanksmuse]

Hi All,

This past week I heard a Jensen cello bass, playing in a three piece band Mesmerhythms (guitar, cello bass and guest harmonica.) Music performance was great (sort of an acid jazz genre IMHO - unique sound). The cello bass was a Jensen made in Seattle and it had an amazing sound range covering both the bass (often real time player initiated loops) and the cello - same physical instrument/performer, as an improvised voice, both plucked and bowed.

I looked online at the Jensen instrument offerings for the cello bass and they include in addition to a great acoustic bass sound, cello string notes that can be had in fourths (EADG versus standard cello strings in fifths - convenient if you want to play a cello with your bass fingering patterns), also it featured MIDI out, and even 5 string models and 4 string with extensions. Also the bowed cello was very expressive. Quite an impressive instrument and player. My question is: Does anyone know of other manufactures who are building EUBS/cello basses with similar properties?

Thanks for the advice.

 

[John Burgess]

I do a lot of electronic interfacing, you can check out my videos on my youtube channel if you like.

I also use pitch to midi converters, though its not a simple task. I looked up the jensen cellos and they dont seem to specify what P2M converters they use.

You can add P2M functionality with any analog signal, the most effective software one I have used is the pitch a bitch VST plugin by bitscrew, but its windows only and obviously you need to have a live laptop setup.

A hardware solution would be something like the sonuus bass to midi or the instrument to midi converter. The B2M has a standard midi out connector, the I2M uses a USB interface (with MIDI and audio out) so again you need a computer.

The technology isnt great though. MIDI isnt very well suited to fretless instruments. You will have a lot of undesired notes triggering.

 

[DoubleMIDI]

I don't know a pitch to MIDI converter, that works with the continous variation of a bowed note. I guess the built-in "MIDI" is only a separate string pickup like the Roland GK-series for guitar. In this case you need a pitch to MIDI-converter and these only handle note-ons an pitch variation successfully but not varying dynamic on a single note.

Also most Pitch-to-MIDI-converters are slow on low pitches, the only exception is the AXON-series. But even the Axon is a bit slow on the E-string of a double bass (and even slower on a low B).

The only thing you need to get on the instrument is a good individual string pickup mounting, so that crosstalk is minimized (otherwise you get problems when you assign different sounds to different strings. But in theory, you can avoid pitch-to-MIDI-conversion if you only want to process the sound. You can use the individual string pickups to put their outputs (with some electronics) into a multichannel audio interface and process each string seperately with some software. (OK, you can also do it with hardware, but then you need at least four strings of effect units to handle each string individually. If you don't need that, you can use the normal mono output for effects.)

 

[John Burgess]

The sonuus i2m converter has a number of modes including bass and voice to give differing note on/off behaviours. It does work with bowing, but none of them work really well. You have to limit your expressiveness, and have flawless intonation to get clean MIDI notes.

 

[DoubleMIDI]

The AXON can work with pitch bend up to 24 semitones, so you can make a 2 octave glide from your starting note without retriggering, but your synth needs to be able to do a 24 octave pitchbend too. Also pitchbend resolution (on transmission and on the synth interpretation needs to have a higher resolution than 7 bit to make a smooth transition.
The retriggering is only needed if the pitch bend range of the Pitch-to-MIDI-converter is set too small (or if the implementation of the P2M is bad).
But the pitch bend range of the P2M needs to match the pitch bend range of the synth sound or the pitch will deviate from the acoustic sound.

That's the reason why many MIDI-guitarrists use the AXON and the Casio VZ-synth series. The Casio VZ-instruments are able to interpret 14-bit pitchbend over a range of up to 4 octaves up and down. The Kawai GMega allows 2 octaves pitch bend, also with 14-bit resolution.

Remark: a 7-bit pitch bend has 64 steps for each direction. For a pitch bend setting of an octave (1200 Cents) the step is 1200/64, about 18 cents per step, very clearly audible and not very pleasant.