PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Can we talk BIAB Midi here?

It's possible that they took the raw MIDI, and applied filters to selectively filter out everything except note-on / note-off events. This would significantly reduce the storage size of the MIDI data. This is only a hunch mind you, I'm not sure what methods were actually used, but this would deliver such results.
Trev

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.



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.



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.

Insights and incites by Notes

This is all true but lets get this back to the real world we're talking about here. We're talking about a Biab user use knows nothing about midi and is probably not interested in spending thousands on top level synths.

Also I have to make a point that Trevor made about his Roland RD keyboard. I know all about that stuff, I have a Kurzweil PC3, a Hammond SK1, a Roland FA06, A Korg Pa1xPro, plus several more. I also have a Knabe antique parlor grand I completely rebuilt myself 10 years ago. Yes, you can capture a pretty good midi performance on a midi piano but when you talk about pedaling, only a few keyboards allow for half pedaling for example. Some synths will read that data, some won't.

Of course midi is all over the place. It's in movie soundtracks and in lots of other studio performances. We're not talking about that here. Again we're talking to some noob Biab users who know squat about all that.

It's so easy for a bunch of experienced musician nerds like us to get sidetracked into the high level technical details of this as soon as someone like me tries to put it into simple enough terms so a noob can understand it.

I can't speak for some of the posters in this thread, I'm simply making assumptions based on what they posted. I "get the impression" they're not interested in spending lots of cash on this stuff. They're using the basic GM synths and maybe they might step up to getting a little bit deeper in SampleTank or something but that's about it. That makes all this high level midi stuff that is certainly being done a lot on a professional level completely irrelevant to them.

Bob

You are correct, most posters don't want to spend a lot of cash.

With one decent synth you can have a nuanced MIDI performance by another musician as easily as you can have a nuanced RT performance by another musician.

There's an SD2 on in Ebay right now at $102.50 current bid, a Roland Sound Canvas for $60 buy it now, and a much better SC-88 for $189.95 buy it now. We're not talking 'break the bank' money. Many people spend more than that a month on Cable TV.

And these are consumer level synths and don't cost nearly as much as a Kurzweil or SD90 pro level piece of gear.

And unlike the digital audio file, when you get MIDI performances on your computer you can transpose, speed up, slow down without artifacts, change the instrument, and do hundreds of other things you cannot do with the Audio recordings.

For most of us, computer music is a toy, and with MIDI as one of my toys, I get to do a lot more playing.

The investment of a good MIDI synth will last for years and years and years. It will improve your BiaB listening experience and allow you to enjoy the thousands of MIDI styles and songs as much as you do the RTs.

Plus it's a new toy and can inspire some on a new adventure in music.

Notes

You got to give me a little more credit than that Bob.
And by the way, I do have a pretty penny invested in gear.

While I do appreciate your point, the problem is you present the impression that it takes not only a talented piano player with a good set of keys, but also two stage hands to pull levels and throw valves, a producer to coordinate the whole thing and a sound engineer in order to "record" a performance in midi. In fact the required controllers for a piano appear to be built into any setup keyboard and follow the artist. No all that complex. So I do feel I get it now.

The real issue at hand is how does BIAB implement and provide the midi. That is where this started and I think I got it now. While they could have done it in different ways, they did what they did.

Let's also not forget what the purpose of RealCharts is (was?). It was to allow you to "see" what the person was playing. A side benefit was that you could (in many, but not all) cases take the notation and use it as MIDI. But the original intent was so that for those that read music, you could see (while hearing) what the artist was doing.

I think it's great that you can use that MIDI/notation to assign other instruments, change some notes, etc., but it was never advertised as "the performance" to allow you to change a few notes and still recreate that performance with those changes. It purpose is to serve as the fakebook version of the performance.

It's great that you can use it (albeit limited) for a few other things, but that was never the intent (as I understand it).

That's exactly correct John and I mentioned that earlier.

Dan,I wasn't just referring to you, there were a couple of others earlier who seem to have dropped out. It's good you have an idea about how this works.

Concerning the half pedaling I mentioned above I just did a quick search on that and found tons of people asking about it. Very tricky and without that option a piano midi track can sound pretty stiff. To do partial pedaling you need a proper pedal first of all that sends continuous sustain controller messages, not just the much more common sustain on/off. Trevor's Roland has that built in but when you're talking about using other midi controllers like a guitar controller and using that to trigger a softsynth you're diving into a minefield as to whether you can get proper pedaling to sound on a piano midi track or not and it makes a huge difference in the sound.

Bob

If a guitarist or a MIDI keyboard without a programmable expression pedal wants to achieve half pedaling they would need two things. One a softsynth that has that capability and an programmable expression pedal that sends 0 through 127, not one that only send 0 and 127 - off and on. One like this would work nicely for half pedaling:

http://www.amazon.com/Behringer-FCB1010-BEHRINGER/dp/B000CZ0RK6/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1452557501&sr=8-7&keywords=midi+expression+pedal