I have thought at some length about buying a midi keyboard, and even asked around here about which to buy, but as I was trying out Intuem the other day, I began to wonder if a midi sequencer wouldn't be enough.

What reasons are there for using midi keyboards (other than the fact that registering Intuem costs almost as much as a keyboard itself)? Is it just force of habit, or are there things I can never produce with just a sequencer?

I'm no keyboard player - far from it! - however searching for melodies or basslines, or drum lines etc is MUCH easier than with a mouse, clearly.
You don't particularily need to be a *keyboard* player to find melody lines, deduce the modes, chords etc and bash it in. Using a keyboard will give you rythmic lines you can never dream of with just the piano-roll & mouse.
And you can always edit & quantize the keyboard mistakes you make later on.

I think a (small, like Evolution Mk-225C or Oxygen 8, or the brand new Roland/Edirol one) is invaluable.

Good points. While none of the large hardware distributors here in Sweden have the Oxygen or the Evolution keyboards in stock, there ought to be something I can use...

Perhaps I had better drag myself over to the closest music hardware store...

Disclaimer: Im slightly partial to Evolution, since I work for them, however, I think their hardware is superior, as an expert techy.

You could also consider the latest controler from Edirol, which has 30 keys and all kinda stuff. However it looks like hell, and it probably doesn't fit my chair.

YES the trick with those small keyboards like Evo/Oxy keyboards is that they fit between the arms of a chair! so you keep them there on your knees while fiddling controls on the mac, and then continue bash stuff in on the keyboard on your knees when you want to.

;-)

From a grizzled greybeard on this subject : creative spontanaiety will never be replaced by MIDI note editing.

And I am an evangelist for MIDI note editing. I don't know how many hundreds of hours I have done of it, for everything from country fiddle parts (purists will now shrink and shudder--but the part has fooled many people into thinking it was played) to full symphonic orchestrations and almost everything in between. There are many things you can do very convincingly, especially using human feel and groove algorithms (maybe that should be "algo-rythms" ) like Digital Performer has.

But there is a magic spark that creative players create, and it only comes in the moment of real-time creation, a thing that cannot be analyzed, programmed, or successfully even described, arising only out of the interaction of a musician with an instrument and/or with other musicians. It's a thing of joy and beauty, and it has a "Wow!" factor that just doesn't come any other way.

I recommend that as much as possible, play your parts (or get a friend to or hire a player for specialty parts)--however funkily. Most sequencers allow you to do loop recording, either over-writing your last pass with each new pass, or creating new files with each pass. Pick your best one (or, if you've saved multiple passes, pick several and edit them together onto a new MIDI track), and then tweak to your heart's content, editing out clams. Then don't over-quantize. It will have a "feel" that you just aren't going to get any other way.

Once I had a great bass part that had been recorded in audio only, but it had to be transposed several steps for a different singer. Opcode's Studio Vision allowed me to convert the audiio of the bass to MIDI, then I transposed it, assigned it to a good sampler bass patch, edited some pitchwheel to emulate some slides that got lost in the process, and was able to keep the great feel of that bass part pretty much intact. It was a key "personality" of the song.

There are many war stories. This has been one of them.

We have more options and tools available to us as musicians than at any time in the history of the world. It takes a player playing to make the most of it.

Absolutely true !

As a piano-player (I can´t call myself keyboard-player, because I hate to carry the stuff around and fiddle with sounds, patches, programs etc. on stage - when all I want is TO PLAY MUSIC) I use my Synth/Digitalpiano and a Sequencer Software mostly to make playalongs for myself to practice with - in order to improve my keyboard-playing and improvisation. Sometimes I try out rhythmic/harmonic things that I want to use in arrangements for the various bands I play in.

While I was in school I started homerecording stuff on an ATARI 1040ST and a ROLAND D10 synth.
But all the time I faced two problems:

A) Either I reached a point, where I ran out of ideas and my songs remained incomplete

B) Or I actually completed some Songs - which was even worse for me

Here´s the reason: If I wanted to play my tunes to someone else, I simply had to press the START button. The computer did the rest. I had made myself obsolete. (Do not inhale the remaining puff of yellow smoke - and don´t step on my ashes scattered on the floor. Thank You)

So I decided long ago that editing every detail (hmmm, should that note last 47 ticks instead of 46 ?) wasn´t my kind of bag.

To return to Levon´s quote:

I´m absolutely thankful for all the possibilities of MIDI/Audio Recording - but I still prefer to PLAY !

If I had to choose between a 50.000 EURO studio complete with everything I don´t even know the names of and a STEINWAY GRAND - guess what I´d take ?

Maybe I´m a leftover from some other age...

Nevertheless - Greetings to all the fellow musicians around here

snuupy

hi!

i also think that a midi keyboard has got enough pros for its price.
as others allready said.
it is really much faster, if you just want to sort of "jam". if you worry arround with midi note tools you sit hours and hours, and with your MIDIinput you simply start.
i also use an Evolution keyboard, the MK261.
i am also not a keyboarder, i am a drummer, but the keyboard plus clever midi-live-manipulation tools (such as arp, chord,...) allow to create your ideas.

i use another simply analogy:

of course you could draw an image like this
opening a text-based window and making commands

pixel 33/56 y
pixel 56/87 y
pixel 40/85 y
pixel 50/01 n
....

which finally may give you a simple picture after hours of editing, but you could also simply draw it with a mouse, or even better a grafic-tablett (that s also suchalike conflict of which is the most efficient interface...)

you got me? you got me!

i ve allways been an opponent of grid-based (strictly quantized) music, where you set a dot in a step-seq, and i wanted to do my drum-things with my midi-drumkit and a soft-sampler.
and i have to say, that works pretty well with reason (it has got a low latency, in logic's EXS it s delayed a bit more). but i am even a bit unsatisfied with my electronic drumkit (an alesis D4 with drum pads) because it s MIDIoutput is not that fine. i found out that it just sends out 1/16-notes, no smaller ones, and the velocity is not that exact, but okay.

i think if MIDI-instruments get finer and finer, and thus soft-synths/samplers, natural playing is more and more realistic, and that s the big pro: it is so flexible!

stefan nowak
vienna