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!

I'm primarily making electronic music with Synths and drum machines, but since I learnt guitar at younger age, this is more musical for me to write and compose music with than say piano. Hence the reason I wanted a midi pick up for my guitar.

I use the midi pick up with my DAW (Ableton Live) and directly into hardware synths, mainly Elektron.

Pros
- Has enough control via the software to configure for your desired setup.
- Tracks playing very well.
- Extremely creative and fun way to use with synths.
- Wireless works perfectly.

Cons
- Installation can be tricky.
- Only comes with one mounting adhesive and bracket, for this price it should have two at least.
- Can be hard to get the correct height in relation to the strings.

Initially I was suspicious of the bluetooth because the delay factor has always been a major problem with all the guitar to midi devices I have tried. Surprisingly the response time was a very good.
Having said that, the setup of the pickup was a very fiddly. I ended up putting it on an old strat copy I have because, although a number of different mounting options are provided, I could not find one that would fit on the guitar I wanted to use.
Once everything was optimised, I discovered that playing it as cleanly as the guy in the promo vids is no easy thing. The right hand technique has to be spot on or there are stray notes all over the place.
The software and the sound banks that it comes with are great and the Tripleplay app offers a some unexpected and exciting possibilities.
Is it worth nearly £300? If you are a guitar player who wants the occasional synth sound under you fingers - probably not. If you are prepared to approach it like a new instrument, then yes it could be.

OK, so a little background.

I've owned twice the GR20/GK3 combo (GK3 had been installed on 3 different guitars), I own the GM800/GK5 combo (GK5 had been installed on 3 different guitars and now it's installed on another one) so I can only compare the TP with these.

In terms of single note tracking beats every other guitar synth I've owned hands down. You can do really fast passages that simply cannot be done with the rest of the bunch, not without false note triggering etc.

It has less system/hardware settings to adjust than the rest, but it does the job.

Now, In terms of playing big chords, especially if muting adjacent strings is required, out of the box it's a little worse than the rest, BUT fooling around with the hardware settings and adjusting the playing, gets the job done.

Personally, I am keeping the TP, this is what I use nowadays so I recommend it for anyone that is looking for a guitar synth to use it with VSTs. For live use obviously the GM800/GK5 seems a better option unless you want to depend on a computer.

The software is OK, a bit steep learning curve if you are not familiar but learning how to adjust the hardware settings is more than enough (you don't have to load your VSTs through the TP software).

The installation is easy BUT, having to permanently "glue" one of the mounts on a specific guitar is a big minus to me. They should give the users the capability to also screw the hex pickup and be able to adjust the height whenever is needed.

I had to add a shim to one of my guitars in order to get the needed string clearance.

And since there is no way to adjust the height after the installation, I recommend you do your homework first, decide which string gauge you are going to use first. Because, if for instance, you start with 9-42 and you want to change to 10-46, there is a chance the signal will be so hot even with the sensitivity at minimum settings, you won;t be able to set it properly unless you increase the string action (or add a shim if your guitat is bolt-on) which, well, it will change your instruments playability.

Also, I trully believe the instructions on setting up the strings clearance is plain wrong. Fishman say just leave 1mm gap between the pickup and the strings. If you do that and start playing, say, in the middle of the freatboard or at the last frets, the signal will be getting overloaded which increases the chance to start getting artifacts (dying mice sounds etc.), that's easy to see if you have the TP software open, monitoring the sensitivity bars and playing across the freatboard. My advice, do it like you would it if you had the Boss/Roland guitar synths; Adjust the sensitivity with the last frets pressed. So. 1mm gap between the pickup and the strings with the last frets pressed.

The battery life is great, but in real life I don't think it's 20 hours, probably 20-25% less which is still great.

They should have already come out with a revision and change the USB port to USB-C instead, if you ask me, because it's a PITA to have to deal with cable orientation on such small plugs (and if you make a mistake, it's easier to destroy the USB port of the transmitter).

Can't really comment on the range as I have a USB extention cable so the transmitter is 2m tops away from the receiver with no obstacles in the middle.

The latency is minimal which is great since it's wireless (warning, I am talking about the clean signal of the hex pup compared with the dry signal of the guitats pickups, I am NOT talking about VSTs, that's a totally different story, and it depends on the VST itself, PC and audio card, buffer sample settings etc.)

All in all, for people that need a hec pickup to use VSTs I recommend it,

I am using the Triple Play for recording MIDI notes (these could be used with software instruments or for creating sheet music).

Pros
- Basic note detection is working fine
- Since I don't want to fix the device permanently to my guitar, I am glad that also some easily removable adhesive tape does the job, at least on my guitar.
- Can be used on a multitude of different guitars (there's some basic hardware included to adjust the height of the pickup).

Cons
- Tiny artefacts are recorded on a regular basis (very short MIDI notes), especially at the beginning of a note. You might not notice when just playing, but if you need clean MIDI data some cleaning is required first.
- Don't expect fast lines, like some shred solo, to be captured reliably.

Overall it does a good job, if you can live with the cons.

This is a great product for recording midi sounds. Lag, missed or unexpected notes are perceived only when trying to play lines with a lot of notes. When used for simple harmony to comp it can be used in a live setting, otherwise I would only recommend it for studio use. The tracking is great once calibrated! There is a learning curve to achieve a proper use, clean and precise playing is essential.

Pros:
- No major work is needed on the guitar to install the product.
- Tracking is great for common use.
- Can be configured in many different setups.
- Plug and Play.
- Best solution for studio use of guitar to midi.

Cons:
- Lag and unintended notes can occur if one tries to play a complex line with a lot of notes.
- Throughout calibration and adjustment is needed to achieve optimal tracking.
- Would only recommend for a live setting if intended as a comping and/or ambiance setup, not for complex and dense soloing.

Hi everyone! Let me share my thoughts and experience about TriplePlay. First of all, quality of this device is pretty fine; it is doing all declared functions nicely. So, about "good things" you can check youtube videos. I can say about my "dislikes".
1. Tested on x64 Windows 7 Ultimate, Intel Core 2 duo 2.9GHz, RAM 4Gb; x64-based application plays with a bit delay up to 0.3-0.5sec, x32-based app - increadible delay 3-4 seconds
2. MacOS El Capitan, MacBook Pro 3.1, Intel Core2 Duo 2.4 GHz, RAM 2 Gb; x32-based (v1.2.3672) and x64-based (1.4 beta) works pretty fine except some "heavy" instruments (for my old macbook 2007 it's very good); CPU loading up to 15-20% withing the system. But, SampleTank 3 - should be downloaded from Fishman update software website (not from IK Multimedia).
3. I found that picking style should be a bit different from regular electric guitar picking style, it needs more precision and from time to time you can get some "artefact" sounds, possible it needs to play closer to bridge.
4. the only single magnet in package for transmitter, it could be better to have at least 2 for using on several guitars.
All other thing are pretty nice (from installing hardware to enjoing the play)
Hope this is helpful for you to make decision about buying it.