Fishman TriplePlay Express USB-C MIDI Guitar Pickup

Works great to drive your midi gear much better tracking than most

I really like this fishman tripleplay no letancy

First of all, it didn't fit on all 3 of my guitars. On a Gibson LP with Hipshot Tone-A-Matic bridge, it wouldn't fit between the bridge and pickup. On my PRS SE Mira and LTD Viper 201B baritone, it fit, but with it raised as high as possible, it was still far lower than it's supposed to be from the strings. It must be designed for Strats or Teles. So I jury-rigged a shim to be able to try it out... WOW... the tracking is unbelievably terrible! I played a slow, simple, 3-note riff into a DAW and it tracked as many as 24 different notes!!! (See pics. You can see which 3 notes were intentionally being played.) The software is terrible. It immediately crashed upon scanning my plugin folder during its first run (on a brand new PC w/96GB RAM and 14th Gen Intel i9 24-core CPU). It supposedly can send each string on a different MIDI channel, but I couldn't find any setting to accomplish this with. It does let you divide the fretboard into 4 quadrants that play different synths within the app, but there's no way to do this within the DAW, so what is the point if you can't actually do anything beyond playing around with it?! But even if all of that DID work, the tracking is SO bad, it's completely unusable. So I got the Behringer PP1 eurorack module (which requires a eurorack power supply module to use). This works SO much better at converting guitar to MIDI in realtime. The trick is to use the neck pickup and roll the tone all the way off to 0. I also have EMGs with a VMC variable mid control, and using that to further cut ~1kHz all the way, the PP1 actually tracks better than any other device or software I've used for this. It still gets a few stray or wrong notes, but not so many that can't quickly be edited. The problem with this is, you have to dial in the guitar to be completely muddy for it to track well enough, so you can't simultaneously play the guitar as a guitar thru an amp AND have it converting/sending MIDI to a synth. It's also monophonic. The TriplePlay is supposedly polyphonic, but it's SO BAD that it doesn't even matter... it's completely unusable. It's because it's taking a signal straight from the strings right next to the bridge, where a guitar is the most trebly and mid-forward. It NEEDS to hear ONLY the fundamental in order to track half decently. You have to use a neck pickup AND cut all the treble (and high-mids, if possible) in order to have ANY chance of a usable, reliable-enough, outcome. The PP1 can take a mic input and convert your voice (or anything you can mic) into MIDI. I haven't tried it yet. It also has CV and Gate outputs for integration with any modular synth devices. I've been underwhelmed, at best, by most Behringer products I've used, but the PP1 is the most usable realtime guitar -> MIDI converter I've used... The Fishman TriplePlay guitar MIDI pickup is the absolute worst guitar -> MIDI converter I've used.

This tracks pretty well, but the hex pickup doesn't fit on my tele or strat without raising the strings.

painfully hard to get working, tried on 2 different guitars and could not get it running right. Compared to the Jamstik core or the Jamstik midi studio that work perfectly out of the box, this product is not even close. I wanted to love it as I have some nice guitars that could use this for midi work but its too fussy to get this right.

This product is nice, it works, but it's a bit buggy. I mean, it inserts a lot of ghost notes. You can improve this fact through the use of their utility software. You can set the pickups sensitivity, so that you get better results. Plus sometimes the plug in you use for your software instrument has settings that can affect the ghost notes factor. Logic, the DAW, has search features and delete features that allow you to find and remove most of the ghost notes quickly and easily, so the ghost notes are not a kill joy completely if you use Logic. Maybe other DAWs have that same ability. (TO search for MIDI notes by velocity and length as the ghost notes are usually low velocity and short length, shorter than your real notes usually and lower velocity than your real notes, so finding them, separating them out in a search, is possible). So I gave this a 4 star because it does work. I have it on a Strat. It fits on a Strat real well.

It works great. Two things: 1. be very precise setting up the pickup. 2. The software that comes with and your DAW may not recognize the pickup unless you start the software first, THEN plug-in the USB. On the MAC it did not work if the USB for the pickup was plugged into the computer before the software was started. So, launch the software, then plug in the USB.

Why did you pick this product vs others?: I really wanted to like this product and spent hours on the setup really trying to make it work! But in the end, I think the video speaks for itself. Compare the raw audio vs fishman pickup performance on the same recording. The fishman output is definitely... quirky. I have a recording with chords as well, the fishman totally misunderstood what I was playing. Maybe in the hands of a better guitar player things are different but even after trying very hard, this is not going to work for me and I will be returning this product.