Yamaha EZ-AG and SubtleSoft’s MidiPipe
Set up the Yamaha EZ-AG midi guitar on your mac!
I have been looking for a midi guitar for a long time. Most are too complicated or too expensive. I wanted to simply plug in a usb cable and start playing. I am not a professional musician but have played guitar for years and occasionally play around with making music on my computer.
Then I saw the Yamaha EZ-AG. The price was right. It was around $199 and it had mid in/out. It has buttons on the neck instead of strings, but has strings to strum with at the sound hole. It is really very responsive for finger picking, hammer-ons and even sliding through frets. You can’t bend the strings while playing but for the price I can live with that. Its very easy to play.
Now to the midi side of it. I already had a midi to usb adapter gathering dust somewhere so I plugged it into my G4 and opened up Reason.
And then…nothing.
I couldn’t get the midi interface to be seen by my G4. First, I installed the Yamaha driver, then the midi to usb adapter driver and still … nothing. Yamaha didn’t have anything on its site to help with the problems I was having, mainly having my computer see the midi input. Remember the part where I was looking for inexpensive and not complicated?
It wasn’t until I came across a great forum dedicated to the EZ-AG at kvraudio.com/forum. As I read through some discussions, I saw several people had the same connection problems I did. The suggested solution seemed to be a software program by SubtleSoft called MidiPipe.
It worked perfectly.
I installed the program, chose the MIDI-GUITAR-Helper.mipi, (a sample midi pipe supplied with the program) and made a few adjustments for my USB adapter and to assign strings the way I wanted. Opened up my sequencing program and was able to start recording.
Bottom line: I now have a midi guitar instead of a really expensive plastic toy with lights. The MidiPipe software is an excellent program, easy to use and change to your liking even for a non- programmer and new mac user! Oh and did I mention its free? …although you might just want to donate a few bucks. Yep, its that good!
Here you can download the app. Here’s the link to donate.
In my next post I will write up a quick tutorial for the EZ-AG and MidiPipe.
