I must respectfully disagree with your assessment Bob. 25 years ago that may have been true, but definitely not today.

A good MIDI just like a good RT captures a players performance. And like live players, you have good performances and bad ones. It is not right to compare bad MIDI performances to good live ones or vice versa.

I record everything live with an appropriate MIDI controller so what you get from me and many others is a capture of a players performance. It doesn't take 20 years of learning how to work MIDI, like the Real Tracks it just takes learning how to play a musical instrument.

Because the performance is captured by MIDI instead of an analog to digital controller, it isn't any less of a performance than one captured by an acoustic instrument.

The acoustic controllers on a piano are pedals soft, sostenuto, and sustain. Also available on a good electronic piano, except they are electronic switches.

An acoustic piano changes the volume and timbre with how hard you hit the keys. An electronic piano measures how hard you hit the keys (by how fast it goes from open to closed - velocity) and a decent playback synth changes the volume and timbre according to the velocity.

A lot of the live pianos you hear on modern recordings from Nashville, New York, LA and elsewhere were done with electronic pianos. Between the keys and pedals and the sound generation of the piano there is MIDI data.

My saxophone controls pitch and timbre with a reed. My wind controller sends out pitch and timbre messages to my VL70-m synth with a 'reed'. My sax controls volume and timbre with the force of the air across the reed. My wind controller has a breath pressure sensor that controls the volume and timbre with the force of the air stream.

If you haven't done so already, go to http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=330647&page=1 and watch me play the wind synth. If I put a MIDI sequencer on the end of the synth, it would record the performance in MIDI and generate it exactly as it was played, providing the synth was good enough to do so (cheap sound card soft synths cannot).

Recording the MIDI data and playing it back would sound identical to the live performance.

The fact that there are MIDI performances in virtually every pop record made in the last 25 or so years should be enough to convince you that MIDI captures live performance just as much as an audio recording does, just in a different way.

Anyone who can play a RT piano part can do the same thing with a MIDI piano and record his/her performance as MIDI data. When played back with a good synth, it will sound like he played it live.

He/she doesn't need 20 years or 20 seconds to learn MIDI, just start the recorder, sit down at the keys and play.

But with MIDI you can play it back on different pianos. If he/she played it on a Steinway, you can choose to have the performance on a Yamaha. You can get more radical and play the very same performance back on a Rhodes, Clav, Guitar, Celeste, Vibraphone, or whatever you have in your synth.

Sure you can step-enter MIDI and massage it to sound better, and plenty of people do, which is why MIDI gets a bad name.

Or you can play the parts live and with a good controller and playback synth end up with a musically nuanced recording of a live performance - every bit as nuanced as an acoustic instrumet - but thousands of times more editable.

Quote:
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)…


The following recordings were made with MIDI instruments, recorded either on the gig or a home studio, and would sound exactly the same played back with the same MIDI data on the same synth.

Clip 1 Clip 2 Clip 3 Clip 4

When recording these, I did not even think about MIDI. I just put the instrument in my hands and played. I used the same sax playing skills I've had since junior high school. Just like the RT performer used his/her instrumental skills.

They are MIDI performances and they are LIVE performances as well.

There is no significant difference - except with MIDI you can edit the result.

Quote:
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…


I'm not dissing RTs, there are uses for both RTs and MIDIs. Different tools.

That's why carpenters have more than one tool in their tool chest. A crescent wrench will drive a nail, but a hammer does that better. Sometimes a socket wrench will do, for other applications a pair of pliers is the right tool. Sometimes RTs work perfectly, other times MIDI will do the job better.

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Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
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