A couple of quotes on MIDI:

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)…

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Excerpted from Keyboard magazine, March 2014 by Craig Anderton:

…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.

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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…

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I feel that I can take a BiaB MIDI file, download it to a MIDI sequencer or DAW, add a few things, subtract a few things, move a few things around, change the inversion of a chord so the melody note comes out better, change a couple of voices (patches), add a real intro, add a real ending, and so on, then turn the already very good output of Band-in-a-Box into something ready for prime time.

I learn how to improve from things I try that work, and I learn what not to do from things I try that don't work.

The result is the backing tracks I make for my duo today are much better than they were in the 1990s because I've learned so much since then.

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

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

100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
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