Philip K. Gisslow

I've played guitar since I was a kid — rock, and a lot of shred: fast, busy, hands-ahead-of-your-patience playing. So when I got into electronic music in 2014, one thing drove me up the wall: there was no fast, natural way to get what I played on guitar into MIDI.

So I built one. The first prototype was a glorious monster — an Arduino with electrodes wired to every string and every fret, sensing contact to work out which notes I was fretting. It worked, but it was deaf to how hard I played — so I started sampling the raw pickup signal through an ADC to capture velocity. Once I had that, I got obsessed with the real prize: detecting pitch from the audio itself, in real time. That obsession became MiGiC — literally a Midi Guitar Converter.

I ran MiGiC as a free public beta from 2014 to 2016 while finishing my M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Chalmers. After graduating in 2015 I worked as an engineering consultant at ICTech — who then backed me to turn MiGiC into a real company in 2016. MiGiC 1.0 shipped soon after, and Evo followed in 2018.

The question every player asked never changed: “Can it do chords?” For years the honest answer was “one day” — real-time polyphonic pitch detection on a raw guitar signal was considered borderline impossible. In 2020 I took MiGiC fully independent — just me, in a workshop in Karlskrona, Sweden, no investors steering the roadmap, no support tier between you and the person who wrote the code. That decade of obsession, the one that started with a tangle of electrodes, finally became MiGiC NX and then MiGiC Poly: true, real-time polyphony. The feature a generation of guitarists has been waiting for.