I played a guitar patch with MIDI before I started bringing a guitar on the gig, and when playing a back yard party, the guitarist host came out to see who was sitting in on guitar.

I played a trumpet patch in a country club lounge and a trumpet player came out of the dining room to see who was playing trumpet.

Those who say MIDI sounds cheesy are wrong. MIDI has no sound. MIDI instructs a synthesizer as to what sound to play and how to play it. Some synthesizers sound great others sound cheesy.

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)…

If the big studios in L.A., Nashville, New York, London and other major centers don't think MIDI sounds cheesy, it's probably not.

Probably more important than the actual tone of the MIDI instrument is the expression of the person who is playing it.

Emulating a guitar, trumpet, sax, or whatever is a little like a comedian doing an impression of a famous person. When that comedian does his or her impression of a famous person, their voice isn't exact, sometimes not even close, but you hear the famous person. Why? The patterns and nuances of the famous person's speech are more important than the tone. I'll repeat because it is that essential: The patterns and nuances of the famous person's speech are more important than the tone.

Same with MIDI. You need to recreate the pitch, dynamic, timbre, phrasing, and so on of the instrument you are doing an impression of. There are 128 MIDI continuous controllers that are designed for just that: http://www.nortonmusic.com/midi_cc.html

Learn how to use these, and you can emulate an acoustic or electric instrument. Emulate what you can and use them when appropriate.

Here are a few clips taken in 2004, on the gig, with a very low-fi mic (the one in a pre-iPod Archos Juke box) and ripped at a low bit rate. To put it simply, the tone is a fraction of what it is supposed to be. But you can hear the instrument I am emulating because I have recreated the nuances of that instrument as best as I was able to back then (I've gotten better since).

I used a Yamaha Wind MIDI controller and a Yamaha VL70m synth module.

MIDI Sax emulation 1

MIDI Sax emulation 2

MIDI Guitar emulation 1

MIDI Guitar emulation 2 -- This one was done in my friends home studio. He is a fine guitarist but wanted some MIDI guitar on his self-released CD.

BTW, the backing tracks for all by the last one were also complete MIDI made partially with BiaB, exported to a MIDI sequencer and edited there.

So IMO using MIDI can make your music more personal, more of your expression instead of simply replaying what someone else played, more versatile, more varied, and in many ways better.

Get decent synthesizers whether they are software plug-ins or hardware (I prefer hardware), listen carefully to how different instruments get their 'personality' via the nuances they use, learn how to use the continuous controllers, then go about emulating what you can of the instrument you are 'doing'. There is a learning curve, but your music will be better for it.

Insights and incites by Notes

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

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