Fishman Triple Play

Having been a wired Midi Guitar Player for over 15 years, I was excited by the prospect of owning The Fishman Triple Play

My first impression was that of a very good build quality of the pick up and controller and well thought out application/instruction to install it to various guitar bodies

Good instructions and all the necessary included tools, was confirmation that it was generally intended to be a very user friendly item to install

I was unaware how much of a challenge it was going to be in fitting it to my Telecaster however and it proved quite difficult with unsatisfactory results at first until after some trial and error, I decided to cut the shape of the carrier for the pick up out of the scratch plate to recess the pick up by 3mm and to also ensure some adjustment for the correct height
This was not a decision I made easily and not for the faint hearted!!

I'm sure not all guitars would be this difficult ...

It did however, work a treat!

The Fishman Triple Play does require careful setting up with the software
The sensitivity of the pick up and the height of pickup in conjunction with the guitars action, makes a huge difference to the overall performance
The software has been a bit frustrating, it seems that you can't return to the Fishman Triple Play software window after using a third party plug window i.e. NI Kontakt without shutting down the NI window first?

Experimentation by actually playing nearer to the bridge pick up got preferable results

I bought the Fishman Triple Play to play horns, in addition to guitar, in a soul band project, but soon realised it has great potential and flexibility as a general midi controller and now firmly accompanies my midi controller keyboard I use for composing

I still can't get my head around that its wireless though, with next to no latency, just the odd rogue glitch which is more down to my incorrect finger positioning and pressure than anything else ... just amazing!!!

I've now bought a wireless guitar set up too which now gives me total freedom on stage, in particular ...

I've yet to find a way to wirelessly control the volume, which I prefer to operate by foot pedal and am currently hardwiring a volume pedal between the computer interface and the PA

I'd recommend The Fishman Triple Play to anyone who is looking to either dabble in controlling their computer generated sounds with a guitar or who might be looking for a guitar midi controller alternative

The Fishman Triple Play is a serious contender in the Midi Guitar arena and gives the competition a real run for their money, especially considering the expandability of sounds

Above all else though, I'm having loads of fun with it!! ...

gpa

Recently bought the Fishman Triple play

I can honestly say, I have never been so disappointed in a product than this.

My issue is all about the marketing and promotion of the Fishman Triple play pickup.

The bottom line is I get huge latency, on all 4 PCS I have tried it on. It is like having a delay pedal, I click the string I then hear it half or one second later.

There is no troubleshooting guide on the Fishman site, just videos of how to set everything up.

I have used the correct spacer, adjusted the pick with the little guitar tool and altered all the sensitivities of each string as per instruction and still have latency.

The only piece of advice there is from Fishman is when you are installing the software (bit late now I have bought it), where it states I may need a low latency driver for my computer.

This is where it gets annoying for me. I did not expect to have to buy a stand-alone computer for this or change anything within my own computers at home.

Let me quote Fishman’s own words.

“Triple Play controllers, iOS app or plugin give players access to virtual instruments, loopers, sequencers, effects processing, and more on any DAW, PC, Mac, or iPad.”

---------Any DAW, PC Mac or iPAd------

It does not say, you need a dedicated setup with low latency drivers, where you need to switch off all other sounds and remove unused software, switch to high power mode etc etc.

When I go on to the forums, they pretty much state that a dedicated computer is needed and ideally it should be a MAC.

I bought this assuming there was no latency and could just play and play on my 8GB 2,7GHZ, windows laptop. That is pretty much what all the marketing says.
I now know why there are very few 5 stars against this product.

I attempted to install the ASio4all low latency driver on my laptop, but triple play software just crashes when I attempt to open it. Not to mention, the times when I lose sound completely, unstable software as some put.

I received this Thursday Morn and now on Saturday night nearly 3 whole days, I have realized this just is not fit for purpose (from a marketing point of view).

This is for those who already have a fast computer set up in the studio. Or prepare to invest in a dedicated set up, leaning how to do it and extra cost.
Had I known this, would never have bought it, the overall cost is not worth the investment in my opinion.

After 3 days I just got sick of it, just sick.

I know that those who have delved with midi guitars would say this is normal. But I trusted the marketing of Triple Play, I am not someone with a midi set up. I just wanted to get new sounds from my guitar.

After lots of forum busting, I now know that Fishman cannot state “almost no latency” as Latency is depended on everything in the chain from the pickup to the speaker. Not just the pickup.

You cannot use any laptop, and certainly not the min 4gb required mentioned on the box.

It also stuns me that after all these years there is no troubleshooting video or documentation on their website, everything is based on it working first time, plug and play. I learned everything from third party forums.

I now know I will never get those 3 days back.

So if you are like me and have seen the great videos and believe this could be you, by just purchasing this product, think again.

The Triple Play system pick up is nothing more than a wireless pickup with a dongle.

The sounds and everything else is created through a computer system. If you do not have a computer system, powerful enough and set up for midi, then you cannot recreate what is on the Fishman Videos.

This is not mentioned within Fishman's Marketing.

It states

---------Any DAW, PC Mac or iPAd------

Fits very easily and well to a guitar with a Tunomatic bridge (I used a Jackson Rhoads). Floyd bridge guitars will require sufficient space between the bridge and the pickup and necessitate using the 'mild' adhesive to attach the pickup to the guitar itself. The wireless functionality is great - no noticeable latency and battery life is excellent. The stock / default sounds are wonderful and I could made very good use of the strings, wind, sax, flute type instruments but I found that piano/keys and and other 'high attack' type instruments such as nylon stringed guitar suffered terribly from ghost / artifact notes and were practically unusable even where playing extremely cleanly. Perhaps a factory fitted Tripleplay might improve on this (such as the Godin or Fender Tripleplay equipped guitars that are available).

Unfortunately, the real problem that I found was with the software. Even forgetting the time consuming and impenetrable 3rd party software components provided on a 'trial' basis (but still require registration and authorisation), the base FTP installation was incredibly unstable, at least in Windows 7, and would crash completely seemingly at random. The software interfaces are also quite terrible. Native instruments and Fishman should be ashamed of themselves for producing such user unfriendly interfaces.

I could have lived these shortcomings with that had the software been more stable. Unfortunately the instability of the base FTP software made the whole package utterly useless for live performances and there was no way I could rely on it for fleshing out the sound of a covers band.

What a fantastic bit of gear! I purchased this over 6 months ago, and I finally feel qualified enough, to make a decent short review on it!

I originally purchased this to use live. My band has a heavy use of synths, so I thought it would be cool to take some of the synth lead lines from our music, and play them on guitar! It works brilliantly for that. From my experience, it works with almost any synth plugin, but does track better on some than others! I run VST plugins through Abelton Live 10, and the USB Stick provided shows up as a midi usb device.

The use case that I hadn’t even thought about was in song writing! It’s amazing for this. There’s plenty of demos showing how it works for drums, and although cool, I haven’t used it for that. I use it mostly on violin and keyboard parts. It’s perfect for creating chords or tracking lead line melody’s. The latency is very low, but sometimes needs tweaking a little. So I just quantise the midi once I’ve tracked, and it’s perfect!

This is an amazing tool for anyone looking for a way of playing synths live on guitar or for writing! Highly recommended.

The reason I’ve put 4 stars on a couple of fields, is because the software is a little complex to understand off the bat, and the latency of some synths makes it not useable for live playing where you need it to be perfect!

Overall I highly recommend!