[sdiy] MIDI isn't musical : Flame bait?

[Scott Gravenhorst]

Sure, it won't do *those* things, and perhaps a few
others.  That doesn't make the case for MIDI being
unmusical altogether.  It makes it unmusical for 
those things.  There are many many other things 
for which MIDI *is* quite musical.

Since I don't find myself doing keyboard slides
and alternating high/low 5 finger chords in rapid
succession, MIDI works very well for me and others.

As I risk repeating myself and what others have said:
MIDI isn't for *everything*.  Nor is any tool for 
*everything*.  Not too many people have gotten
5 note chords out of a single trumpet.  But I
think we can all agree that this is not what 
a trumpet is for.

So if you can make use of MIDI, as I can, then it
is a musical tool.  If not, then ignore it.

Don Tillman <don at till.com> wrote:
>   Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 09:44:17 -0700
>   From: Ian Fritz <ijfritz at earthlink.net>
>
>   I don't have a way to test this, unfortunately. But how fast are you really 
>   playing when you do this? Assume you can hit 25 notes in a second. This is 
>   40 ms between notes. I don't see where there would be gross distortion. 
>
>Huh?  25 notes per second?  
>
>A 1/4-second slide over slide over 4 octaves of white notes (think
>Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis here) is an easy 128 notes per second.
>
>Now try this... go up to a keyboard, play a five note chord with each
>hand, then alternate playing them (high-chord, low-chord, high-chord)
>three chords a second, double it to 6 chords a second, 12, and even a
>rank amateur like myself can do 24 five note chords a second (sounds
>like a poor man's Ginastera piano concerto).  That's 120 notes per
>second also.
>
>So example 1 is a slide and example two is a pair of chords, both
>easy to play and both running 120 notes per second or so, or
>8mSec per note.  If MIDI could only handle 120 notes per second you'd
>have a trainwreck, the timing would be so grossly distorted that you
>couldn't tell the slide from the chords.
>
>An order of magnitude higher speed (0.8 mSec per note) will allow you
>to discern example 1 from example 2 pretty well, but wouldn't fool
>anybody and wouldn't address the performance subtleties of a more
>accomplished musician.  MIDI is about 1 mSec per note.
>
>An additional order of magnitude speed increase (0.08 mSec per note)
>is necessary for a keyboard performance that sounds more like a guy
>playing a keyboard than a bad protocol over a serial stream.
>
>Okay?
>
>  -- Don
>
>-- 
>Don Tillman
>Palo Alto, California, USA
>don at till.com
>http://www.till.com
>

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