Earnest Trenear
July 3, 2006

Rating: 9/10

I purchased this as an amateur performance-oriented jazz-rock guitarist. I work in a local Specialist Performing Arts Secondary School. Guitar to MIDI hasn’t featured in school so far but is likely to do so in the future.

I’ve only scratched the surface in the few days I’ve had it but the AXON is capable of some stunning effects for band/solo and very useful for studio work, especially if you don’t feel like getting down with a keyboard. Check out the Burr Johnson video on the Terratec website if you want to know just how Guitar to Midi might change your life. Just be aware that it needs programming to do this stuff– it can’t read your mind but the versatility (meaning - complexity) might just bend it (your mind that is) a little! Don’t ask about the tracking – there isn’t a problem. However, getting the best out of the AXON necessitates a fairly precise playing style so if your style (like mine) is inclined to a degree of laziness, be prepared to do some work in this area. The disciplined approach, as ever, is the best.

Once I got the pick-up installed (see below), the AXON worked right out of the box. I found the guitar pass-through (down the AXON cable and out of the back of the rack unit) added some noise so I ended up routing the guitar signal on a separate cable (despite Terratec’s recommendation); this may be connected with the rack location I chose for the AXON so try both and try moving things around to avoid hum fields from other equipment.

Regarding pick-up installation…
A semi-permanent installation is undoubtedly best (for me anyway). I don’t intend to move the pickup from one guitar to another and I don’t imagine many people would, but I do like to keep instruments in hard cases for protection when they’re not being played so the pickup needed to be removeable.

After mucking around, giving up with the adhesive pads supplied by Terratec, and feeling quite sick at the thought of drilling into that lovely wood, I managed to install the pickup on an Ibanez Prestige (diseased poplar top) with a Floyd Rose by making a suitable bracket from sheet brass and attaching this under the bridge height adjusters. It only just fits but it works fine. It’s worth taking a little time to set up the individual string responses and the velocity parameters of the MIDI instruments to get the sounds spot on. However, I am planning to move the pickup to a hand built “musicman style” guitar with a stop tail piece as soon as time permits. The reason for this is simple – many midi instruments are chromatic in nature and the continuous train of slight pitch bends which are inevitable when playing anything with a whammy bar are a recipe for trouble because unless you’re really, really careful, the natural guitar output tends to sound out of tune with the midi instruments. You can set the AXON to accept continuous pitch change information (as opposed to having it quantized chromatically) but did you really want a piano with a whammy bar? (I know it sounds like fun but, unless you’re an absolute master of the whammy bar with perfect pitch to boot, or don’t have the luxury of choice, my recommendation is: Don’t do it.) The AXON has a number of options for controlling pitch bend which you can use with some success but to me, this is a very much a “cake and eat it” scenario. There are some chromatic instruments that sound great with continuous pitch change available; I might just buy a second pickup or consider a permanent piezo under-saddle installation…

Complaints – I have a few personal observations. Some of this is a matter of opinion and I’m perfectly happy to accept that I’m being stupid but:

Complaint 1 – THE WALL WART.

1) I hate the damn things!
2) The supplied wart is too big for most mains distribution boards and stops you using the adjacent sockets. Thanks a bunch Terratec!
3) The 12 volt AC connection on the rack unit is right next to the guitar output –is that a recipe for radiated EMI or what?


Complaint 2 – The Manual

The content is fine apart from the section on the PC Editor. The editor is probably a fine piece of software and it should make programming the AXON child’s play but it doesn’t and some aspects of its use are completely obscure. Even reasonably savvy PC/Mac using guitarists are going to be struggling with this. The whole section has obviously (to my mind) been added as an afterthought; it needs to be rewritten and properly integrated with the rest of the manual if it is to be of any use.

Overall I give the AXON 95%. It does what it says on the box and I can, after all, buy another power supply. The Editor is the only significant shortfall and once the menu structure is in your head, programming the rack unit directly is not difficult.

willy
April 27, 2006

Rating: 10/10

This is probably the most revolutionary product people started disorting amps. I have never used something so intuitive and transparent. No endless setting up settings and menus, it just works. In a word. INCREDIBLE.