Midi Keyboards And The Men Who Play Them..., Can midi sequencers replace them? Options

[Ionas]

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?

[Levon River]

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.