Jam Origin MIDI Guitar review

Featuring Virtual, Wi-Fi and cable MIDI outputs

  • £2.99
  • $19.99
Reviews
By
published
For best results, you need super-clean playing technique

MusicRadar Verdict

A useful app, and we'd strongly recommend trying it out to see how well you get on with it.

Pros

  • +

    Good single note tracking. Can track different right-hand techniques.

Cons

  • -

    Performance suffers with humbucker instruments. Not completely accurate. Latency could be better.

MusicRadar's got your back Our team of expert musicians and producers spends hours testing products to help you choose the best music-making gear for you. Find out more about how we test.

Plug your guitar into your iDevice, run this app, and it converts what you play into polyphonic, velocity-sensitive MIDI in real time.

The app itself is free, but a £2.99 in-app purchase is needed to make it useful, unlocking Virtual MIDI (for driving other iOS apps), Wi-Fi MIDI (best with a low-latency ad-hoc network) and MIDI cable output.

Conversion latency is OK, though still off-putting during faster parts. Tracking of single-note lines is good, but with chords, notes were sometimes missed or cut off prematurely.

For best results, you need super-clean playing technique, and even then, the MIDI will not always be a laser-accurate transcription (and using a humbucker pickup seems to really mess up the tracking).

While not quite the flawless MIDI guitar nirvana seen in Jam Origin's promo video, to MIDI Guitar's credit, it handles picked, fingerstyle and legato playing, and any spurious notes are usually at least related to what you played.

Computer Music
Computer Music

Computer Music magazine is the world’s best selling publication dedicated solely to making great music with your Mac or PC computer. Each issue it brings its lucky readers the best in cutting-edge tutorials, need-to-know, expert software reviews and even all the tools you actually need to make great music today, courtesy of our legendary CM Plugin Suite.