There are certain things that are done with MIDI that are absolutely impossible to do with Real Tracks. Each tool has it's place and if you use either one or the other exclusively you are cheating yourself.

Ignoring MIDI is like trying to eat soup with a fork because you only want to use one tool.

Example: I put this challenge up a couple of years ago, and still have no takers. Check out the Demo song on the right hand side of this page http://www.nortonmusic.com/fake32.html (it's the linked song). I dare anyone to come close to it with a Real Track.

MIDI is extremely editable, audio is not.

Excerpted from Keyboard magazine, March 2014 by Craig Anderton:

…Today you can easily record 100 tracks of digital audio on a basic laptop, so MIDI may seem irrelevant in the studio. Yet MIDI remains not only viable, but valuable, because it lets you exploit today's studio in ways that digital audio still can't.
…
Deep editing. Digital audio allows for broad edits, like changing levels or moving sections around, and editing tools such as Melodyne are doing ever more fine-grained audio surgery. But MIDI is more fine grained still: You can edit every characteristic of every performance gesture: dynamics, volume, timing, the length and pitch of every note, pitch-bend, and even which sound is being played. MIDI data can tell a piano sound what to play, or if you change your mind, a Clavinet patch. With digital audio, changing the instrument that plays a given part requires re-recording the track….but MIDI can do much more…

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Excerpt from Electronic Musician (EM) February 2013 by Craig Anderton:

…Thirty years ago, at the 1983 Winter NAMM show, a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600 talked to a Roland JX-3P and MIDI went mainstream. Since then, MIDI has become embedded in the DNA of virtually every pop music production (yes I stole that line from Alan Parsons, but I don't think he'll mind)…

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So don't discount MIDI - use MIDI when it's the best tool for the job and use RTs when they are the best tool for the job.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks