Below you can read a great critical review of our Ztar Z7S-XPA from the wizards over at SoS. (All copy, text, photos, copyrights belong to SoS.)
Fed up with the vagaries of pitch‑to‑MIDI guitar, but don’t have time to learn to play a keyboard? The Ztar offers clean, keyboard‑like MIDI from an instrument that guitar players can relate to instantly. Could be just what you need...
San Diego‑based Starr Labs (originally the Starr Switch Company, until 1996) have been making guitar‑like MIDI‑controller instruments since 1992, but somehow it has taken us until now to get our hands on one at Sound On Sound. Taking a radically different approach to the pitch‑to‑MIDI strategy adopted by most of the other pioneers in this field, founder Harvey Starr reasoned that, as MIDI is a key‑based protocol, it made most sense for MIDI guitarists to address it via a set of keys, but with those keys arranged in a pattern that corresponds to a guitar fingerboard. The solution came in the form of the iconic Starr key‑based ‘fretboard’ that has continued to grace the majority of the company’s models over the last 18 years since the Ztar came into being. The keys on a Starr Ztar neck are actually low‑profile, long, narrow buttons arranged in rows, to represent fret positions, and columns, to replicate strings. Pairing the pressure‑sensitive Starr fretboard with a set of triggers for the right hand results in a guitar‑like instrument that outputs clean MIDI with none of the delays and pitch detection errors that plague pitch‑to‑MIDI instruments.
Starr Labs’ instruments have always been customisable to a degree, with plenty of options and configurability available to purchasers. Early Ztar models generally had a bank of six elongated switches, or ‘Trigger Bars’, for the ‘picking’ hand, as well as a selection of larger pad surfaces suitable for drum triggering, but an option for right‑hand triggers based on six short lengths of real guitar string was soon made available. These are perhaps easier to adapt to, for most guitarists, and also allow notes to be ‘damped’ in a fairly intuitive way. The strings generate no pitch data (in the basic ‘guitar’ mode), merely note‑on timing, and velocity. In other modes, however, the strings can also be used to send chords, trigger sequences, or apply Continuous Control messages simultaneous with picking notes. You might, for example, want to be able to add modulation or crossfade between voices via velocity....
Read the full article/review here: SoS
