Firstly I wanted to say I love this stickist community. More importantly after a grand stick trial today at kev-c s place I'm hooked. The stick was all I hoped it would be. Awesome!!! I'm ordering a rail board tomorrow. It can't come soon enough. Question is how hard is it to add a midi pick up down the road? With exchange it might be cheaper to buy a gr 55 with the pick up later here in Canada. Also I want to get comfortable with the railboard before adding midi to it. How custom are the pick ups that Emmett puts on? I assumed as long as the pick ups are close enough to the strings all should be fine.

Rob

Emmett customizes the Roland GK-3 for Stick usage, so you would have to buy the pickup itself from Stick Enterprises. The Railboard has the "MIDI channel" built into it, however, so you may be able to install it yourself at some point in the future.

The attached photo shows a GK-3 pickup with the housing removed.
It's a flexible circuit board with each pickup having its own pair of color coded wires.

You could ask Emmett to drill and tap the holes for future installation

Rob, can you clarify this statement?

There's a physical groove (channel) machined into the body of the Railboard at the appropriate spot ready to receive a midi pickup. You can't just use a Roland midi pickup made for guitar on Stick because guitar necks (and therefore Roland midi guitar pickups) have an arch to them and Stick fingerboards are flat. Emmett rebuilds the arched pickups into a flat housing and offers them thru his website. Early Digitech 10 and 12 string pedal steel midi "SteelRider" pickups are flat to conform to a pedal steel neck and they'll work on a Stick as the string spacing is the same. Good luck finding one of those as there's only about 50 of them ever made and that was 20 years ago. If you want it to fit right and track good your best bet is getting one from Emmett.

It was mentioned specifically in the Railboard announcement video (around the six minute mark):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUUpAuNhpCM[/youtube]

The relevant page on the SE website is here.

You are referring to a physical position and not a MIDI device?

The GK-3 has a tiny screw in the middle of the pickup for adjusting the arch to fit any guitar whether a flat or curved fingerboard. However, this does not address the string spacing issue.

Thanks all. I had not realized that Emmett rebuilds the midi pick ups to make them flat. I was wondering what customization he did. Now I know. I noticed that the gk 3 ,and there is a wireless midi pick up I can't recall both ,had slightly arched tops of them. I incorrectly assumed it would work. So glad you all help me decide. I'll order the midi pick up today as well.

Next question. Is there a midi interface other than GR 55 that is still in production? I have keyboards with midi and a lot of soft synth patches on my computer. I'd really rather avoid buying a GR 55 at least for now. I understand the GK 3 needs to go into a special interface before I can use my sounds. Again if I'm wrong I'm sure someone out there is more knowledgable and can let me know.

Thanks to all. I like how we all "stick" together. (I'm sure that's old)

Rob