social.noyu.me

well you see, a “piano” has 1 polyphonic channel with 88-note range, velocity, and 3 controllers, whereas a “guitar” has 6 monophonic channels each with its own circa 24-note range (staggered and overlapping), velocity, pitch bend, polyphonic aftertouch, and uhhh many controllers

but you know what has 16 polyphonic channels with 128-note range, velocity, pitch bend, channel aftertouch, five controllers, and 128 different programs?

that's right: a General MIDI System Level 1 compliant tone generator.

but this is a shitpost, this is unfair to guitars

i think part of my wonder at the guitar is it is just impossible to model as a midi instrument. i mean, you can try. midi guitar controller systems exist. midi guitar synthesisers exist. but every single one is but a shadow of a real guitar, the inescapably physical instrument

hell, even a piano can only be modelled by midi by assuming you play it “correctly”. if you open the lid and directly play with the strings, that's considered cheating or something

@hikari MIDI is more about digitally recreating a score, rather than a performance, I feel. There are a lot of subtleties when it comes to playing an instrument, any instrument, which are not really part of the composition, but are important during performance.

That said, the piano played in a normal way must be one of the least expressive mainstream instruments we have. And therefore also one of the easier ones to model in software.

@hikari I'm not dunking on piano btw, I think piano is a fantastic instrument and can evoke many emotions when played well.

It's just a fact it has very few expressive features (velocity and sustain, and that's about it). Most other instruments are a lot richer in this regard.

@Tijn unfortunately i can't agree with this, MIDI is a radically different thing from sheet music and has always been designed and used to capture and reproduce performances, not to replace scores; it is fundamentally unsuited to the latter

@Tijn what is colloquially called a “MIDI file” has many names, a notable one that occurs again and again “MIDI performance data”

@hikari I get what you mean, but don't you agree that when it comes to what data MIDI records, it's more in line with what's in a score than what is going on between the player and the instrument?

Like, when a violinist plays a piece, the score just says which notes to play in what tempo, at what volume. MIDI does offer a bit more possible parameters, as do scores btw, but it remains a very coarse description of what's it actually like to play the piece.

@hikari What a violinist is concerned with is the angle of the bow, how tight the grip is, how much pressure is applied with the left hand, etc. Tons and tons of details and subtleties that the performer is conscious of and are crucial to how the end result sounds, none of which are typically part of a MIDI file or a score.

@Tijn MIDI data for a synthesiser would precisely recreate every detail of a performance. this is also the case for MIDI data from a player piano.

for a violin, well, a sufficiently advanced performance capture system ought to capture the details you describe. it's just hard

@Tijn even in the simplest case a MIDI file is still a performance and not a score. timing and expression are conveyed precisely, there is no room for interpretation. trying to turn a score into a MIDI performance requires interpretation, as does the reverse. now, you can make a very spartan and uninspiring MIDI for a beautiful idea, but that also exists for audio recordings, we call those sketches or demos

@hikari Yeah, this all came from the observation that piano and most synthesizers offer very few expressive features.

Which is also why MIDI is so compatible with those kinds of instruments, and many other types of instruments remain awkward and difficult to turn into digital recreations to this day.

@Tijn MIDI can offer a lot of depth of expression, but it's very hard to figure out how to represent that for an instrument where a human directly interacts with the strings. for a synthesiser it's trivial because the control surface is already digital

@hikari yeah, that was exactly my point all this time really. Me saying MIDI is more like a score is mostly about what sort of data a typical MIDI file contains: information about pitches, timing and velocity, which is very high level and far removed from what it's like to actually play most instruments.

You're right it's possible with elaborate controllers and extra CC data to capture all sorts of things in MIDI, so in theory the possibilities are endless.

@Tijn i apologise for arguing about it, it's just a personal bugbear from having seen first hand how badly it represents sheet music and vice-versa

@hikari hey no worries :)

@hikari I liked the garage band guitar patches that make a finger slide sound if you play the right notes in sequence at the right velocity.

@hikari This is honestly a part of why I am longingly waiting for my guitar to arrive despite normally not being a hands-on/physicality kinda person

I have played around in trackers, DAWs and the like and even with freely available synth plugins, vsts, instrument samples, soundfonts, for most instruments you can get something "good enough" to the casual listener

But not guitars. They pretty much never sound close to right in my casual experience.

You can use instrument libraries with a wide range of high-quality samples and use all sorts of setting to vaguely emulate the many many things you can do on a guitar beyond the most basic playing

But as you say, it's all a shadow of the real thing.

Like it didn't sink in until I actually started thinking about the instrument properly last month, but even the most basic chords are hard to represent accurately in MIDI or MIDI-adjacent workflows, because whether you strum up or down *matters*

Even before we get to playing off-aligned with the frets, hammer ons, slides, the many different kinds of plucking, one of the most basic things, *directional strumming*, has to be emulated.

You can't just take a melody track intended for piano and change the instrument setting to guitar and maybe adjust the tuning, you need to actually offset the notes ever-so-slightly (far more finely offset than a lot of default settings will let you) so they're close enough to sound like a proper chord played at once but just far enough to reflect the strings were *not* hit simulatanousely, because that's actually audible, even casually!

(specifically, I think the tone and *emphasis* feels different in an up vs a down as high/low notes dominate the sound more depending on which is played first, rather than there being an actual audible delay)