Matts Ramblings

Last month, I ordered a piece of kit called the Axon Ax-50, a now discontinued guitar->midi converter. Now this box just converts the signal from a special pickup, called a divided pickup into midi. So, I also ordered a GK-3 from roland, which is their “divided pickup”. and today, I finally managed to find the right cable to connect the two.

I tried setting this up on my Ibanez SZ520FM, however the gap between the body and the strings at the bridge was really high, and positioning the pickup correctly was quite difficult.

In the end, I decided to put the pickup on my old samick strat copy, the difference was remarkable, Instantly better tracking as the pickup was much closer to the strings.

The way it works is, that the pickup has 6 magnets in it, one for each string. As the string vibrates over its magnet, it induces a current. This is how normal guitar pickups work too, except the GK-3 has SIX pickups, instead of being just one!. So each string’s signal is sent to the ax-50. The AX-50 then analyses each string’s signal, and works out what note was just played. It then generates the midi code for that note.

This is why you need a 15 pin cable, because you need to send 6 audio channels at once!.

And now finally, mr ax-50 is happy.