Originally Posted By: joden
How anyone can even suggest MIDI intruments sound anywhere NEAR a real instrument being played by a real person is totally beyond me!<...>


Depends if you are a good musician AND good at MIDI or not. If you have a good MIDI sound module and a good player you get good music.

But you have to dig into MIDI and learn how to use it, as you do your musical instrument if you want to sound 'real'. Like the drum, MIDI is easy to use, almost any can play with it. But like the drums, it takes practice and learning to play it well.

Every synthesizer since the DX7 has MIDI at its heart.

And you can even fool musicians with their own home instruments.

Examples:
  1. I was playing in a country club lounge and doing an improvised trumpet solo on my wind MIDI controller. A trumpet player came out of the dining room where he could hear us but not see us to see who was sitting in on trumpet.
  2. I was playing a party. Wife was outside, husband who is a gigging guitarist was inside. This was before I started to bring my guitar to the gig. I was playing a Santana song on my wind MIDI controller and the guitarist came out to see who was sitting in with us on guitar
  3. I posted a clip of my playing on wind MIDI controller on the Gibson/Epiphone forum. I didn't tell them it was MIDI, but asked them for opinions. I got a few dozen replies including one that said it was "Jeff Beck Like" and nobody posted that it sounded like a MIDI guitar. Then after a few dozen comments I came clean and told them it was a MIDI performance. More comments came in about how it sounded like a real guitar, and only one said there was something about the use of the trem that sounded funny but he couldn't put his finger on it.


MIDI performances CAN and DO sound like a real musician IF a real musician creates the MIDI performance and uses a decent synth module.

"...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)..."

"…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…"

Quotes from Craig Anderton in Electronics Musician Magazine

If Alan Parsons and Craig Anderton think MIDI sounds real, you are getting expert opinions from a couple of the well-known people in the industry.

Insights and incites by Notes

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

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