PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows real tracks vs midi tracks & styles

"Make new friends, but keep the old."


"One is silver and the other is gold..."


I noted that some people were declaring the demise of MIDI when RealTracks first came out.

Don't know why folks seem to jump to such conclusions, but they do.

I personally expect PGMusic to continue to release new MIDI based styles in the future.

I also expect to see more *combination* MIDI with RealTracks styles to come around, too. To date, we've mostly seen the use of older PGMusic MIDI styles being combined with RealTracks to create a "new" style, but I think that is because PGMusic already has so many MIDI only styles (My current Stylepicker shows the count is up to 1,753, which includes some that I've created or found, but the majority of those are PGMusic MIDI styles...).

MIDI is often misunderstood.

This is partially due to the proliferation of cheap GM MIDI synth solutions, designed for home computer usage and the like, price driven by market.

It is also due to musicians who come to the world of MIDI with expectations of Instant Gratification and when such does not appear to be the case, they prefer complaints to good old fashioned practice, study, equipment upgrades and elbow grease (hard work).

It is interesting to note that we never see someone who just bought their first guitar voicing a complaint that the thing doesn't sound like their favorite artist. In the case of every other musical instrument, it is understood that mastery takes time, discipline, learning, a teacher (for those we *really* want to decrease the time curve anyway) and so many other aspects.

But for MIDI, the expectation is not the same at all.

The same people that knock MIDI as being cheezy sounding likely don't realize how many places they hear MIDI music every day. Movies. Television. Commercials. Jingles. Popular Songs.

I've worked with some consummate MIDI pros in studios, people who show up with rack upon rack of MIDI based synths, keyboard controllers, guitar controllers, EVI and EWI controllers, custom sample banks, you name it.

Experts in their craft, knowledgeable in several differing fields, able to layer patches in ways that sometimes defy conventional wisdom in order to come up with a sound that is much more than its composite parts would seem to indicate, the person who is first call MIDIOT is almost always a very qualified musician on an acoustic instrument or two, with background in a wide variety of performance genre, keen ears, ability to sight read notes that look like a fly crapped on the ledger lines, and do it without an instrument present, no less.

Then there are the true synthesists, who hire out to do the next-to-impossible on a daily basis. These folks are often called upon to literally create a sound for the composer/arranger with nothing more to go on than a few notes on the staff along with a written description of what that composer/arranger thinks that the sound should "sound like". They literally *sculpt* the sound in realtime during the play-throughs, responding to verbal descriptions from bandleaders that defy belief. "That's too cold, Mike!" (Um, should I turn the thermostat up?) or, "Not 'alien' enough!" (Close Encounter of the 10th Kind, maybe?) -- and usually manage to make him or her smile before the take.

I was recently on a Jingle date where the request was for me to come up with a Piano patch that "sounds like a Rhodes Grand Piano". Whatever That might be. Problem was solved in the third or fourth attempt by layering the Yamaha W5 tiney Rhodes sound with the Ketron SD4's mellow Stereo Grand Piano sound, but combining the audio output of the two through two separate MoogerFooger filters adjusted such that the attack of the Rhodes synth's ADSR was slow and the sustain of the Grand Piano synth's ADSR was long. Weird, "paddy" kind of sound that wouldn't work on fast passages. Also fed the stereo result from that through a Leslie simulator set to a slower-than-chorale speed, for spaciality. i doubt if the sound obtained was exactly what the director had in mind originally, but in the end it worked.

Sometimes the job is to be more of a mediator than a musician.

Envoice sent.


--Mac