MIDI dead-ends

[Llyal Gordon]

I appreciate DIY letting me spring-board the ideas of OVERRIDING MIDI. 
The talked DEFINITELY helped. I am saving time not making a MIDI override 
in hopes to speed communication with a synth. 

I did not realize these commercial synths were designed with MIDI as a
primary focus, and not with MIDI as an afterthought- where MIDI set the
limitations on what was to be built. Manufacturers seem to have accepted
MIDI as a bottleneck, and designed their synths around this bottleneck,
making choices on hardware/software that would NOT make the synth
outperform the MIDI bottleneck- for economy. Because the synths could do
complex manipulation of sound, it appears the synth's CPU is more powerful
than it actually is (or has to be because of the limitations of MIDI). I
thought i could tap into this CPU power by accessing it direct. But i have
learned that the use of custom sound chips with a slow main CPU will make
a synth APPEAR to have a powerful CPU. I see now, that i would have to
overhaul the off-the-shelf synth to get the speed results i seek- and not
make some simple bypass modification. 

Of course, this does not help my situation. I could hardwire an analog
synth to 12 or 16-bit DACS, and make a complex switching/patching system. 
That would give satisfying results, but not without definite trade-offs. I
would like to find some digital musical instruments that are NOT based on
MIDI, that overcome the 7-bit resolution and slow speed that MIDI offers,
that can be used for serious real-time control, and can be slaved to a PC
for complex parameter manipulation. 



Llyal Gordon
SUBVOX, tucson AZ
frans at ccit.arizona.edu