PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Beginners Forum Drowning in midi land

Hi. Thank you, and I must look into those products, but please suffer that I'm in the throes of skeptical. Delighted somebody is happy!

Alright, now. Let's get this straight, based on the conversation, as you've made hopeful comments, except that I also use those products and am thinking like science is against anti-gravity, and you're, yet, out there, floating.

Somebody stole into your home and ripped off your midi keyboard. And please don't be a wise guy, ripped off your old keyboard in the closet and all your gadgets, then. You are left with your laptop and its notation software. You call the police, and, waiting for them to respond, you write a piano concerto. You hit play, you're running the notation data into East West Quantum Pole Vault Moocho Platinum Plus Hollywood Keys of Baal, with all ten libraries you need to buy. Are you telling me the playback could fool you somebody was sitting at even a console acoustic piano, slightly out of tune, playing your score? Or, despite Quantum Moocho, will a work MANUALLY SCORED not play worth a hill of beans, in terms of sounding like a real piano performance, this my experience?

If it sounds like a real performance of a manually entered score, what on earth settings are you using, with the caveat you're not sitting for hours, quantifying note phrases, mixing stuff, that is, post-processing the time away, which I take is a resounding no for the all important “no tweaking” aspect of your comments? (By real performance, you close your eyes, and it sounds like just an average quality recording of somebody playing your score on any acoustic piano, could, at least, almost fool you.)

Perhaps I should have cut to the chase: are you talking about note performance entry by a midi controller, instead of manual entry of notes? I was seeking realistic playback of a manually engraved score, not midi controller keyboard entered, with the more expansive electronic articulations in the data. You are likely referring to exporting your keyboard playing into notation/VSTs? In which case, yes, they're great, like the real thing, all sorts of grand pianos available, but the best of which I've tried, some great ones, won't perform a manually notated midi export realistically, my opinion it's an intractable data issue, or lack thereof? Nor have I seen any builtin feature in notations programs to juice some form of export with AI sorts of humanization. Nor does any program I’ve used accurately notate complex performance music: forget about it. I had to conclude, the past day, what I'd like has simply never been developed, and probably won't be, because I believe it’s a dirty little secret most people don’t “write” music anymore, rather play it into the robot, that does the scoring, re: previous posts, how uncouth! It’s the McDonald’s of scoring going on out there, though an occasional quarter pounder with cheese is good, but, otherwise, a steady diet will just make a person fat and lazy. (I mix metaphors better than midi data.)

Never mind me. I’m just pissed off you can painstakingly write scores the good old hard way that all this technology can’t play, with demos that pretend they can, can't play without a post-processing act of Congress, and feel like I landed from Mars, to find somebody who also scores the same old ways and shares the issues. You can score great things you can’t easily play. Nor can a composer be a whole orchestra, on midi controllers. All we can do is write all the notes and expressions that nobody performs, but some tinny, jerky or staccato sounding computer fake rendition of the notes and most instruments. And, speaking of fake, that’s just what I’m convinced the big name demos are: they’ve massaged the notation output, post-processed God knows how much (because they won’t tell you!), as you don’t get that stuff they try to sell their products by out of the box, that plays anybody’s score like that realistic demo. And this is deception. I would love to be proven wrong, hear reliable testimony somebody wrote a complex piano score, 16 orchestral staves, whatever, from their computer mouse and computer keyboard, let's throw in perfecty notated, hit play into that VST and hears something that sounds real or is merely close proximity to fooling you. I would buy that VST in a heartbeat.