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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn’t hold your breath on MIDI 2 guitar controllers being better than MIDI 1. The fundamental problem is pitch resolution and that isn’t really addressed by having a better protocol for representing pitch and intonation.

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MIDI 1.0 has 14 bit (per channel) pitch bend, which is probably fine. What MIDI 2.0 adds is per-note pitch bend, so you don't have to dedicate a separate channel for every string, which is awkward and un-idiomatic. (MPE at least standardized how multiple-channel instruments should behave, but that was a relatively recent development.)

MPE uses channel-per-note which is equally unidiomatic.

Oh I agree. MPE is kind of horrifying when you think about how it actually works. But, it gets the job done, and it's a standard. If you want to do electronic music with expressive instruments right now, MPE is what you would use.

I don't think MPE is the end of the road, though. It'll probably be replaced eventually by something that was designed from the start to do the kinds of things that MPE is for. I'm not entirely convinced that MIDI 2.0 is the MPE replacement I'm looking for. Maybe someone will just invent something entirely new.

(I have some thoughts in that direction that I plan on publishing eventually, not so much in the "hey look, here's a new protocol everyone ought to use" sense, but more like "if you were going to design a music protocol to do what MPE does but better, this is an example of what it could look like".)

> The fundamental problem is pitch resolution and that isn’t really addressed by having a better protocol for representing pitch and intonation.

But having 32 instead of 7 bits for pitch will give better pitch resolution, no? Or am I misunderstanding something?

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