[sdiy] MIDI isn't musical : Flame bait? Hells, yeah!

[Chris Randall]

Just out of idle curiousity, since it seems to keep coming up as an example:

What exactly would be the point of sending the polyglot of information the
keyboard and drawbars of a B3 could generate over the MIDI stream? If you
are a versatile and skilled player of that particular instrument, able to
take advantage of the nuances that such an instrument can provide, wouldn't
you record your performance straight to tape or HDR? Isn't 99.999% of the
Hammond B3's attraction the combination of the organ itself, the Leslie, and
the person doing the playing? I fail to make the connection.

Not to mention the solenoid rig you would have to fashion in order to play
this mythical data stream back on the same instrument. That, I would like to
see. I again submit that this entire conversation is very strange. What is
the main purpose of MIDI? To record a person's playing, so that it may be
edited to suit a particular scenario, or repeated ad nauseum on an
instrument other than the performance was originally generated, generally in
a live situation where the performer either doesn't want to, or can't, play
the performance himself, but wants consistancy.

Assuming we can agree on that fact, and assuming that we can also agree that
for it's primary purpose is well suited to the paradigm of the synthesizer,
an instrument which lives very much in a 1-0 on-off world, would it be fair
to say that MIDI (which as we've all more or less agreed is definitely not
musical, in and of itself, being nothing more than a stream of data) is
capable of reproducing a performance which could be considered musical?

The point being that if it can't, I'm going to call the RIAA and tell them I
don't want any more gold or platinum records, and I'm going to send them
back the ones I've already got, in protest of the fact that nobody told me
the method in which I've chosen to work isn't musical, and therefore can't
possibly be called music.

-Chris Randall

(BTW: The pianos that most major piano players tour with today, including
Elton John and Billy Joel, are empty boxes. They either contain a controller
and a MIDI out, or are a Kurzweil PC-88 in a very large piano shaped box.
The reason for this is the fundamental difficulty of taking a 9' grand on
the road, plus the fact that on stage, during a 3 hour performance, it
_will_ go out of tune. The exceptions to this rule that I know of are Ben
Folds, who plays his piano through a Marshall stack, Tori Amos and Harry
Connick. I'd be interested to hear of others.)

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