[LAD] Potential MIDI headaches?

Len Ovens len at ovenwerks.net
Sat Jan 19 23:40:07 CET 2019


On Sat, 19 Jan 2019, Ralf Mattes wrote:

> Well, it all depends :-)
> I my world there's a group of users for whose field  standard MIDI just does'nt work: teaching
> and researching professional piano playing. The main obstacle is (the missing) velocity/volume/attack speed
> resolution. So our teachers and researchers need to use the partly-proprietary Yamaha Disklavier.
> So,for them, a modern MIDI 2 is appreciated.

Cool. I do wonder where the sample sets are that actually have 127 samples 
per note. Certainly Pianoteq might have a full range but most of the 
electric pianos I have heard sound more like in "Bennie" than anything 
that actually came from strings. I am talking about the people who walk 
into a music store and buy an electric piano or other stage keyboard.

Now any of those people would prefer to sit down in front of an acoustic 
piano, but none of them can afford (or are willing to afford) an electric 
stage/home piano which actually sounds real. Remember that "most" people 
would never think about using a keyboard controller to get sound from 
their computer.

In the case of keyboard synth combinations, where the signal path is 
kb->midi->internal synth. MIDI 2 may show some improvements that even the 
average person will notice. In time such an instrument may even be cheap 
enough for "most" people. However, it seems to me that the synth in the 
pianos I have seen does not even fully use the 128 velocity values 
available now.

In terms of velocity vs. amplitude I would guess that 127 levels at 1db 
per level covers more than most ADC's would show. At .5db per level the 
range is still probably wider than the dynamic range available in a nice 
quiet studio/sound stage... so I would hope that the range of timbre 
differences makes a wider range of velocities worth while. I would like to 
see a blind AB test where the same performance is rendered by the same 
synth in both MIDI 1 and MIDI 2.


--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net


More information about the Linux-audio-dev mailing list