You can turn your favorite axe into a wireless midi controller with Fishman Tranducer’s TriplePlay Wireless Guitar controller. The company gave me a look at the $395 package at Macworld/iWorld this week.

The Fishman TriplePlay is a guitar-to-MIDI system based on a hexaphonic magnetic pickup, working in much the same way as products that have gone before, the best known being Roland's GK systems. Where TriplePlay differs, however, is in the communication between the guitar pickup system and the MIDI end of the business, which happens wirelessly.

The Software includes lite versions of Komplete Elements (Kontakt, GR LE, and Reaktor synths), Sample Tank XT, a notation program, as well as the essential TriplePlay application. The TriplePlay app includes an excellent tuner, and a wide range of performance parameters such as sensitivity settings, poly vs mono mode and transposition.
My newly installed plug-in isn’t showing up in Garageband! How to get Amplitube 4 presets to appear in Garageband. Where is the serial number and registration code for my Fishman Triple Play? When I launch my Fishman TriplePlay software, it only scans my 32-bit plug-ins. How do I make it see the 64-bit plug-ins?
The Fishman Triple Play is simply the best hardware option to date for triggering external MIDI whether hardware sound modules or software instruments. Having used many MIDI guitar converters since '89, I can say that the FTP tracking is very accurate and velocity dynamics are reasonably wide from soft to loud.
Apple makes a little dealie called the Camera Connection Kit that was designed to, just like it sounds, connect an iPad to a camera for downloading or viewing photos. It is basically a USB-to-Dock connector. With one of those, the USB receiver for TriplePlay can hook to an iPad and use GarageBand or SampleTank or Alchemy as a sound source.

The TriplePlay controller comes with a hexaphonic pickup that slips under your strings near your regular pickups and connects to a wireless controller that your mount behind the bridge. A small wireless receiver is also included; it either plugs into your Mac or an iPad using a Lightning USB Camera Adapter, allowing you to record to GarageBand for iOS without any wires.

The name TriplePlay references Fishman’s software bundle that allows you to record using PreSonus Studio One Artist, compose with Notion Music – Progression 2.0, and perform with Native Instrument’s Kontakt Komplete Elements and GuitarRig LE as well as IK Multimedia’s SampleTank XE and Amplitube Custom Shop software. Fishman’s own TriplePlay software lets you pick and control up to four virtual instruments at a time with your guitar. You could, for example, set your two lowest strings to an acoustic bass virtual instrument and the upper strings to sound like a nylon string guitar or electric piano.

Though the installation process is easy, many might not like the look of the low profile box attached to the front of their guitar. For those picky pickers, Canadian guitar-maker Godin (also at Macworld/iWorld this week) will sell you a beautiful guitar with the Fishman TriplePlay built into the body. Be prepared to pay up, though: The model Goodin is showing at Macworld/iWorld lists for $1195.

By Rev. Bill

I have what might be termed as a love/hate relationship with the entire idea of MIDI guitar. After years of gigging with one and spending thousands of dollars on gear, I finally gave it up—I thought for good—about five years ago.

But I knew the second I saw the Fishman TriplePlay at NAMM in 2012 that I would get dragged back in. In fact if the TriplePlay had been around a few years earlier, I would have gladly kept doing gigs as a guitar player, singer and what my friend Larry Hall calls a “key-tar” player. The TriplePlay is so cool that I would have had no reason to ever pack it away.

Fishman Triple Play Ipad Garageband 2

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room.

The words “Fishman” and “MIDI” are going to strike some as being from wholly different lexicons. Fishman makes great acoustic guitar stuff. Pickups and amps and even a very nice little coffee-house sized PA. But MIDI? Well, while we were not looking, Fishman has morphed into a technology company. The TriplePlay may seem out of left field, but only until you think about the amount of tech and the software that is embedded into their proven Aura series of pedals that brings the whole modeling thing to acoustic instruments that is endorsed and used live by names ranging from Jerry Douglas to James Taylor.

Add that to the fact that Fishman is one of the top handful of makers of add-on guitar pickups in the world and the MIDI thing does not feel like a stretch. Or at the very least less of a stretch than the fact that most of the pure tech companies making other MIDI systems have little to no serious experience making stuff that goes on actual guitars. Got it?

Let’s look at that love/hate thing in a little more depth. Maybe it is because of how I got involved in it. Unlike most, I did not come at MIDI guitar because I had artistic aspirations or wanted to explore cool, new sounds. I did it out of desperation.

In the mid ‘80s, I started the band I still play in today. We played some very strange takes on classic rock tunes and a whole bunch of Memphis Soul music. There are huge differences between Memphis and Motown.

And one of those is the prevalence and anchor status of the mighty Hammond B3 organ. The ‘80s were a big time for keyboard players. Synth-pop was everywhere and keyboard players were in huge demand. And we were without one. It was a time of skinny ties, high-top Converse, synths and sequences. And arpeggiators. It was not a time of big, beefy drawbars and wildly spinning Leslies. Which we needed.

I knew what we needed but I am completely incapable of playing keys live. (When I record and need a keyboard part, I have been known to do the part in two passes.

The first pass is the left-hand part played with both hands and the second the right-hand part played with both hands.) So I stumbled somehow into my first MIDI controller. A Casio without actual strings. From there I moved through three or four different instruments and finally settled on a Roland system that was connected to a Squire Strat.

In terms of control and sound modules, I ran the gamut. I was an early adopter of the Ground Control pedal that would send up to eight MIDI commands over eight channels with a single footswitch. I had a bizarre Roland amp that switched speakers on and off to simulate the motion of a Leslie. I had a forgotten and under-appreciated module from Peavey that just did organ sounds. At the height of my craziness, I traded one of the bestest guitars I have ever owned—a great Strat with a purple sunburst paint job done by Wayne Charvel his own bad self—for an E-Mu Proteus module. (I still regret it, Ed Ocean… But at least I know she went to a good home.)

Bottom line is I spent more time and money and effort in getting the MIDI thing together than I have in any other single exercise in gear.

The last “key-tar” gig I played was with the Larry Hall Project at the Blue Water Casino in Parker, AZ. I carried that Roland system with a floor-based sound/control module that connected to a guitar with a special cable with 13-pin connectors. I carried an extra cable because if that one cable failed the whole system was toast. The guitar was a fairly collectible Reverend Avenger whose value has been badly compromised due to a pair of screw-holes drilled in it for the hexaphonic pickup that drove the system. A 20-foot MIDI cable hooked the floor controller to a full-size KORG CX-3 organ emulator sitting in its case backstage. The gear took up half of the cargo space of my old PT Cruiser and it took about 30 mins to set it all up and make sure everything was working.

Today, using the TriplePlay, I could do that gig with a guitar of my choice with no holes drilled in it, a pickup and controller that snap on with magnets, a USB fob the size of a typical flash drive, my laptop and no cables cuz the system is wireless. I can literally fit everything except the guitar and laptop into a pants pocket. And the capabilities and quality of the sounds beats the crap out of that much bigger rig.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX

Not a lot. At least not in terms of “stuff.” You get a hexaphonic pickup that is hard-wired into a controller. You get a wireless USB receiver. You get a USB cable for charging the controller