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

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.

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