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

[Glen]

At 08:28 PM 1/13/02 , jhaible wrote:

>I will back up Don here.
>
>He talked about playing a Hammond - now how will you transfer the
>phrasing of a Hammond (with several contacts per key) over Midi,
>which only knows velocity and release velocity, assuming a linear
>interpolation between the action of just two key contacts ?

That's a job for your synth, not for MIDI. You could take some info from the
MIDI velocity to control the timing offsets of the various individual contacts,
and mix in a little randomness (belive me there is some randomness in the
Hammond), and also add in a small fixed-deviation factor for each individual
contact to make each individual key have its own characteristic timing
signature. 

You *might* also want to try adjusting the slope of the attack envelopes very
slightly for each note, dependant upon the MIDI velocity. This *might* help
simulate the sound of closing a dirty switch contact at varying speeds. However
this last technique might be better used to simulate the elastomer key contacts
used in some of the old Baldwin organs, in which notes were not abruptly
switched between off and on, but actually went through a smooth transition from
off to on and back to off. It's actually possible to play one of these
keyboards with a soft touch and get all sorts of variations in note attack
times, note volumes, release times, etc.

Unfortunately, I don't know of a synth that can be easily programmed to
recreate the staggered timing of the individual contacts underneath each organ
key. Maybe use Csound instead of hardware? Maybe add MIDI inputs to a *real*
Hammond?   :)

Later,
Glen