PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Unhappy with MIDI sounds

Hi, Bob -

Thanks; wasn't looking to buy, but was just curious about what's out now. I just remember that the Roland SC-20 and the Ketron SD-20 both came out about the same time.

Hi Jeff.
I did some research on the Roland Sonic Cell after reading your message. I was considering the Roland SD-50 and a keyboard controller or keeping my Korg K50 Synth, the midi sounds are not too bad.
The Sonic Cell does indeed look and sound like an impressive bit of kit, gee but what a price..... I think that the SD-50 really has more options than I need with all the recording facilities which I do elsewhere with other kit.
There appears to be plenty of SC's available NEW over here but I have found one 3 months old with a warranty at half price so I have gone for it, doubt I will get it before Christmas now but I'm looking forward to using it. I will probably keep the X50 as I love this keyboard rather than go for a controller as I first considered. Hope I've done the right thing.
Have you any tips on using it???
Regards. Jeff [UK]
Long Live MIDI.

I had both the SD-4 and the Sonic Cell for side-by-side testing. While the Sonic Cell was very versatile (especially with the Patchman enhancements)it sounded nowhere near as real as the Ketron. The acoustic instruments sampled by Ketron are the best (especially the saxes.) I sold the Sonic Cell on eBay after about two weeks of comparison. But again, I mostly play bebop, ballads and bossas so those are the sounds that appeal to me. If you are a rock / funk player, the Sonic Cell may be a better fit.

Bob, you make compelling points about midi. I do use and will continue to use midi, as RTs as good as they can sound can not match the flexibility, and ease of midi. Having said that midi will never sound as real. I have tweaked and tweaked, for hours, and some things do not work well in midi. Hidden in the backing tracks it can get you by. But your example, while very well done, and very effective, is still midi sounding.

While I would never suggest someone scrap midi for RTs, a couple well designed out RTs in a midi track bed can make a song come to life. I take the tracks that are the most "Midish" and replace them, and i find magic at times. strumming guitar, guitar solos, rockin' piano tracks, harmonica, and such. just a taste can make you go wow, now that sound REAL!

When you posted your tracks, and then Peter posted his. I gotta say his kicked your tracks #%& No offense meant but his was live. I can see adding some really cool horns to his would be fun it lacked that, but yours lacked dynamics that the RTs gave.

I wish Peter had just posted the background, and not the melodies, it would have been a better comparison.

BTW, in the bass track on my sequence, I replaced 3 notes in the turn-around to match the rhythm of the horns. I don't see how I could have replaced 3 notes on the RTs.

Plus for my purposes, backing tracks for live duo performance (1) I'm going to play the solos myself and (2) to me the RTs sound too much like karaoke.

YMMV

Use the tool that gets the job done. I see Notes' point and I see Peter's point. Both are correct depending on the need and the situation. Can't control lights or get the exact refinement you may need wth RT's .. but you also can't replace a Brent Mason RT with MIDI.
Both have their place, and BiaB/RB offer both options. There's no reason to argue which is better if both are available.

Yes I agree with rharv you need to use the right tool to achieve your goal and what sounds right to youself, we all have a different perception of sound and quality I guess. I'm getting back into MIDI more this last few weeks and getting some great GM sound from my X50 synth. Hoping the Roland Sonic Cell will improve on that too when it arrives. Anyone using one?
I don't think realtracks sound at all karaoke-ish at all if used right.
Wonderful to have the choice, it should PLEASE us ALL.
Regards. Jeff

Yes agreed, different tastes for different people.

I've always considered expression more important than tone myself, but I know I'm not the definitive arbitrator of taste. YMMV.

To me tone is subjective. Through the years there have been many singers/musicians that I thought had poor tone but have been extremely successful at communicating their personal emotion with the public. A few that come to mind are Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Dr. John, Dexter Gordon, Rod Stewart, John Lennon, and many more.

And as I've said before, what is good tone anyway? To me, while I appreciate John Coltrane's genius, I don't care for his sax tone. For tenor sax, I think Stan Getz had the best tone. Other sax players prefer 'Trane's. And I suppose if I asked 50 sax players, I'd get at least 45 different favorites as far as tone is concerned. So there is no 'correct' tone. And do I sound like Stan Getz? Not at all. My horn/mouthpiece setup gives me more of a rock/blues tone in the ball park of King Curtis but I like to think uniquely my own.

So IMHO as long as the tone is 'in the ballpark' for the genre of music I'm playing, expression is far more important than the tone. And my own personal expression is most important because it is my soul that I am baring to the public.

When I play wind synthesizer, I most often play the Yamaha VL70m tone module. I know that it doesn't have the best tone out there. Samplers and ROMplers have better tone for most instruments. But the physical modeling synthesis of the VL allows me to recreate more of the nuances of the instruments I am emulating and more nuances in the synth voices I'm playing and that allows me to play more expressive music. And it allows me to insert my own personal expression into the music.

So the same for me with MIDI as opposed to loops. I may spend a few minutes, an hour, or even a day tweaking something that comes out of BiaB to make it mine. I don't consider it slaving over the notes or even work. To me it's playing music. What happens when I do this? What happens when I do that? Perhaps if I made the bass play a couple of syncopated notes here it would enhance the song? Perhaps if I changed the guitar patch in the bridge to have more distortion on it it would make the song better? Maybe the brass part would sound better if I made it started with a sfz and then swelled? I think I'll make the B3 patch spin like a fast Leslie here and then slow it down over there. What would it sound like if that sax section part echoed a melody fragment at the end of the phrase? Perhaps the song would have more drive if the 2s and 4s were pushed ahead of the beat, or a few ticks behind the beat? I know that that waltz would sound better if the second beat of the measure was rushed, after all most of the classical orchestras play waltzes like that, I learned to dance the waltz and I know that rushing the second beat feels good. The possibilities are only limited by my own imagination, and if my idea doesn't work, I can always undo it.

I inserted the 11 note opening theme of "Jingle Bells" slowly at the end held chord of a slow Christmas song. It's a fairly standard device, but when an audience member noticed it and remarked at how clever that was, it made my day.

Remember, they call it playing music for a reason. Playing around with it, experimenting, and listening to the results can be very satisfying. We get the "I did it" feeling which is different from listening to other people play music and getting the "They did it" feeling. Plus playing with the music, trying this, and trying that has made me listen to music in a different way. I think, "How did they do that" and then when I get to my 'studio' I try to reproduce what someone else did. If I like it, it becomes another tool in my own musical tool box and that makes me a better musician and it increases my fun when I am playing music.

When Leilani and I started our duo, we took ballroom dance lessons. Leilani has always been a dancer, but I've always been on the other side of the microphone. We didn't take the lessons to become ballroom dancers, but we felt that if we knew the basic steps of the dances we would know how the dances should feel - which beats should be rushed, which beats should be laid back, and so on. The end result was although the large orchestra on the cruise ship played a ballroom dance set, most of the ballroom people packed our lounge because the grooves were right for dancing. Same goes for rock, country, and other dances because this taught us how to listen. The end result was we broke all attendance records for the lounges we performed in on 3 different ships, and we got cabins that were twice as big as the other musicians and we got a porthole so we could look out the window when we were in our cabin. And we ended up playing 3 years on a 3 week contract.

Playing music and composing music is all about personal expression. Playing a CD, mp3 file or a pre-recorded loop is all about listening to someone else's personal expression. Taking the MIDI output of a fine BiaB song and then personalizing it to make it better than it was is not only fun to do, but it takes it out of someone else's personal expression and injects my own personal expression into the song. I become the creator as well as the listener.

I bought my CD and DVD machines to listen to music. --BUT-- I bought my saxophones, guitars, flute, keyboards, wind controllers, drum controller, synth modules, samplers, sequencers and Band-in-a-Box to play music. And if I can't play the music, I might as well pop a CD into the machine and sit back and enjoy someone else's creative efforts. I like to do that too, but I like playing music even more. I want to be the creator of the music that I play.

Again, this is my opinion, and YMMV.

Insights and incites by Notes

Absolutely correct, Bob.

Any discussion about the quality of midi sounds must start with the intended usage. Both you and I are primarily live performers. I usually work in bands so everything is live but I will do some duo work in a casino and once about 4 years ago I subbed maybe 6 gigs for a sick friend who was a solo act. He gave me his midi files on a disc plus I set up a bunch of tunes in Biab and played them live using the Conductor feature. All I used was the very weak Roland VSC DXi for sound. The point here is the difference between playing out live and sitting in your bedroom with headphones and picking apart every little thing in the sound quality is huge. Live going through a 500W PA and a pair of JBL Eons in a noisy live venue, the VSC sounded great. And I mean surprisingly great. I let one song play and went out front to check and it really sounded good, none of that ticky tack midi sound at all. This was just using the minijack output from my laptop. At home the VSC is barely useable.

That's the difference between playing in a noisy live setting and listening in a quiet home studio where you can critically hear every little thing.

Bob

Notes, I will add one more. To my ears (disclaimer) NOTHING sounds as good to me as my old Ensoniq synths and sampler. I have much more control (maybe better stated "sounds I can get with no learning curve") over keyboards that I have been using for years than I do with software based synths that I have never seen before.

Again, for my taste, I prefer my external hardware. There is really no time where I will have a moment of "I have to have that one sound from the Prophet 5 that I remember from the early 80s". My stuff has nice organ sounds, strings, clavs, I have a piano.... just no need for synths for me. Rather than write midi tracks to play note events I would play parts and record audio. In fact in a year with BIAB/RB I have yet to record a midi event. 100% audio.

For the record, you could be recording the MIDI too, just in case you want to try out a different sound at a later date. Or want to adjust the existing synth's sound later. Send it out later as MIDI with a different TVF on that same Ensonique, and it may just make the song.

If possible I record both, and RB allows it. By enabling a checkbox in prefs ..

I understand a couple of things about this debate:

1) Many people listen to MIDI files on the $0.99 cent synthesizer chip on their sound card. No wonder they dislike the MIDI sounds as the Synth they use to play the sounds is cheesy sounding (What do you expect for a chip that costs less than a dollar?)

2) Others listen on software synths, many of which are designed to put the minimum load on the computer's CPU (especially the affordable ones). They compromise the line between taxing the computer and making good sounds. The VSC that used to come with BiaB is a prime example. The original Sound Canvas, Roland SC55 sounds much better than the VSC ever dreamed of sounding -- and it's latency is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5ms (or for all practical purposes, nada).

3) Playing music for a recording session and playing music for a live performance are two entirely different skills and require two entirely different approaches and playing styles. That is why so many groups use studio musicians to cut their records (of course they don't always tell you that). But people like Carol Kaye have played on over 10,000 sessions and were the musicians in countless band and single artist recordings. And that is just the "wrecking crew" group in California.

I don't know if I posted this account before in this thread or a related thread, so please excuse me if it's redundant.

I am doing a "Friday the 13th" party in January, so I learned three songs for the gig, Stevie Wonder's "Superstition", Albert King's "Born Under A Bad Sign" and the Etta James version of The Temptations' "Shakey Ground".

We have a regular Tuesday afternoon gig and we always get there early to set up and run through new songs on the PA system (we have a smaller system in our studio, but it doesn't always sound the same}.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend who is an excellent guitarist and songwriter came early while we were going through "Shakey Ground". He wasn't familiar with the song so I played a WAV file of the Etta James version that recorded from my Vinyl LP and put on my computer (from "7 Year Itch" a masterpiece of an album). Sample of the song in question here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEqfbITeaXc

When it was done he remarked that my backing track had a lot more punch than the recording. Believe me, it's not because I'm a better musician than the session guys on that album, they are monsters. It is because of a couple of things:

1) MIDI instruments have more separation and more dynamic response than a mastered/compressed recording. This is the main reason why audio loops sound so "karaoke-ish".

2) As I mentioned before, playing live is different from playing in a studio. There are things you do live that don't work on a recording and things on a recording that don't work live. Balance, groove, dynamics, etc., are all different on stage than they are when you are looking through the glass of the fish tank.

I didn't do the song with BiaB because I am so in love with the Etta James version that I copied the bass, guitar, and drum part to the best of my ability. I did a slight variation on the horn part, and left holes for Leilani and I to play live instruments on top of the track (I don't want the MIDI musicians to have all the fun).

But basically it is the clear, separation of MIDI instruments and the ability to edit a MIDI file that make my backing track sound better than the recording. If I could have found a karaoke file of that arrangement (I didn't look so I don't even know if it is available) the karaoke version would have sounded like I was playing karaoke. The instruments would have been played, mastered and blended for a studio performance and not a live performance.

Now playing at an ungodly loud volume would help the recording. That's why discos get people moving. But if you hear a live band, a MIDI band and the recording played at the same volume, the live band would have the most punch, followed by the MIDI band and the recording would have the least.

It's just the nature of the beast.

Insights and incites by Notes

Don't wanna hate on midi ,I have used sounds that worked . But in my opinion RT's sound better to me . I have and use some expensive VSTI's and no free ones ,also a MAC with Logic Studio Pro . All have some great midi sounds ,but pale in comparison to PG's new tracks . Logic has ton's of wav based loops that still sound better than their midi . I only say this because when I have brought tracks to sell at studios when it's midi based they say they don't want any Biab songs. When it's RT's they love it . Still only my opinion and people buying my tracks . Sorry if I have ruffled any feathers , I meant to offend no one .

Good musicians, under the direction of a good baton, drop most tied notes and shorten many others. The problem is a real horn will vibrate and decay and many players learn to count and think that 2 is always 2. It's not, if you want ...separation. Midi can have zero decay, and thus there is sonic space. That's ok if you have a band and you are able to creatively account for that.

Two of the three leaders I play horn with are very cognizant of stuff like decay, and you typically get a chart that's all marked up. I find that part most interesting.

I have not messed about with realtracks in this context. I just use my 'ears' to figure out what I want, and if the tracks meet that expectation.