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Sound vs edit-ability is a factor we all have to judge.

While musicians tend to spend a lot of time on sound, I'm a believer that the audience notices expression more than tone. Take the two highest rated saxophone players of the 20th century, Stan Getz and John Coltrane. Play recordings of both to a non-musician listener, and 95 out of 100 will say they are playing different instruments. Truth is they both played Selmer Mark VI saxophones.

And if tone was so important, why did singers like Dr. John, Blossom Dearie, Stevie Nicks, Rod Stewart, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and so many others play zillions of recordings? Less than stellar voices, but good expression.

Unless you have an el-cheapo synthesizer, the problem with MIDI is not the sounds, but how it's played. If you can find a recording of Manhattan Transfer's "Wacky Dust" give it a listen. The synthesizers are analog synths, the kind with no samples but only oscillators and filters with twisty knobs and patch cables. Yet you hear saxes, trumpets, clarinets, and trombones. The tone isn't exact. The reason you hear them is the way they are played.

And to quote Craig Anderton who quoted Alan Parsons, "Since then [1983] MIDI has become embedded in the DNA of virtually every pop music production." So if MIDI sounds bad, why don't you hear bad sounds on virtually every pop recording for the last 30 years? Because the musicians on those recordings know how to play MIDI.

It's really easy to enter notes in MIDI, and therefore there is a lot of bad MIDI music out there. But the difference between entering notes and playing MIDI is remarkable and requires a learning curve. It's easy to get a note out of a drum, but not everyone who can walk up to a drum set and hit the drums can make them sound good. Same for MIDI.

So how do you get MIDI to sound real?

The first step us to understand how to do something other than play notes. Playing a guitar or sax patch like a piano isn't going to fool anyone into thinking it's a piano. Besides for note on, note off and pitch bend control there are many continuous controller messages that can allow you to manipulate the sound after it has been attacked. Complete list: http://www.nortonmusic.com/midi_cc.html

Then you need to figure out how to use them to recreate the nuances of the instrument you are trying to emulate.

Let me explain...

When a comedian impressionist does his/her impression of a famous person (the president or some well know celebrity) you hear the person he/she is doing, and not the comedian. Now the impressionist doesn't have the same voice as the person he/she is doing, and sometimes a voice very far from the subject. So why does it sound like the famous person and not the comedian?

The answer is that the comedian captured the speech nuances of the famous person.

When you use MIDI to emulate another instrument, the trick is to recreate the nuances of that instrument. That's why playing a sax or guitar part with piano-like expression won't fool anybody. That's also why those twisty-knob, non-sampled analog synths in "Wacky Dust" can sound like the Glenn Miller Orchestra

A few pointers to get you started. Saxophones often scoop up to notes from flat to on pitch and because it's easier, vibrato tends to be more on the flat side of "zero pitch" than sharp. On the other hand, guitar vibrato is more often than not from pitch to sharp and back again because it's easier to bend the strings that way than to wiggle the whammy bar if the guitarist has one. Flutes tend to use more of a tremolo effect, changing volume for vibrato instead of pitch (although we still call it vibrato). Trombonists tend to tongue notes a lot, avoiding slurs unless they want the portamento effect of using the slide to glide. Most instruments have a variety of different articulations and most wind instruments are fond of changing the volume after the note has been initiated.

Trying to capture the nuances of different instruments will change your music forever. You will listen to other instruments differently, analyzing how they get their personal expression (which is governed by the physical qualities and limitations of the instrument) and your playing will become more expressive. I use the tricks I learned emulating other instruments to even get better expression out of non-emulative patches. And of course, sometimes I break the rules and use some of the expressive nuances of one instrument on another.

So there is nothing wrong with MIDI. While I do use Real Tracks, I tend to use MIDI more often, because I can't get the RTs to play what I want them to play. On the other hand, I can edit MIDI to my heart's content, and knowing that the audience cares more about expression than tone, if I work hard enough at my skills and use enough artistic judgement, I can win more non-musician ears with MIDI than I can with pre-recorded loops.

Of course YMMV

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