Level 1 · Listener
0 / 100 XP to next level
Instrument to MIDI
Play your bass or guitar into the microphone and send it out as MPE MIDI — drive an Ableton synth, or any MIDI instrument, with the instrument in your hands.
Audio input
Aim for the level meter sitting around two thirds on your loudest playing. A line or DI signal from an interface usually needs less gain than a microphone; a quiet passive bass may need more.
Plug the instrument straight into an audio interface and pick that input below — a direct signal tracks far better than a room microphone, and it is what this was tuned for. A microphone works too, just less reliably.
Live reading
Play a note
MIDI output
With MPE off, bends go to the shared pitch wheel at ±2 semitones and slides will clamp.
No MIDI ports? A browser can only send to ports that already exist — see the setup guide below to create one.
Tracking
Bend keeps one note alive through slides and vibrato. Start a new note re-articulates on hammer-ons and pull-offs.
Higher picks up softer playing, but is more likely to trigger on string noise.
Monitor
The monitor comes out of your speakers, which the microphone then hears. Use headphones, or leave this off when you are sending to a DAW.
Response time
How long after a note is played before it goes out. This is set by physics: a pitch cannot be identified before roughly two full cycles of it have been heard, and low notes have long cycles.
These are analysis times only, measured from the moment the sound reaches the page. Your audio driver adds its own input buffer before that and your DAW adds an output buffer after it — on Windows especially, since browsers go through WASAPI rather than ASIO. Bends, slides and vibrato update continuously about every 10 ms once a note is sounding; only the start of a note carries the delay above.
What this can and cannot do
- The delay on the start of a note cannot be removed — see Response time above. This is comfortable for pads, sustained synths and doubling, and it is not tight enough for fast percussive parts.
- One-note mode is the accurate one. Two-note mode is genuinely experimental.
- Two notes an octave apart cannot be separated: the higher note hides entirely inside the lower one's harmonics. Thirds, fourths, fifths and sixths work well.
- Two notes of the same pitch on different strings come out as one note.
- Three or more notes at once are not detected — the two strongest win.
- Keep this tab visible. Browsers throttle background tabs, so notes are stopped when you switch away.
- Sending MIDI out needs Chrome or Edge. Everything else, including the built-in monitor, works anywhere.