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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Not bad, but completely skips over the piano-centric nature of MIDI and the ways in which this has hobbled musical creativity for 4 decades (despite the rest of MIDI expanding it). The good parts of MIDI are ... OK, the bad parts are terrible. The best thing about it is really just about the only bit of technology the audio tech world ever managed to agree upon that was license free and at least adequate for some important tasks.

Ever since MIDI, every audio tech company has been convinced that its technology was going to be the next MIDI, and that the licensing fees from it would the ticket to an island of their own. E.g. check the state of audio-over-IP. You can almost hear people saying "I mean, imagine how much [ EDIT: Roland ] & Sequential could have made if they had licensed this!"

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> piano-centric nature of MIDI and the ways in which this has hobbled musical creativity for 4 decades

How so? Synthesizers are mostly controlled by piano-like keyboards.

At least, all the actually successful ones.

I was about to say exactly that. Synth music from the 70's and the 80's it's huge in variety, specially the Avant Garde one from Japan.

Synthesizers are musical instruments, which means they have a control part and a sound generating part. Because they are electronic, synthesizers can decouple these to a greater degree than acoustic instruments. That's why you can play any MIDI-controllable synth using a Yamaha EWI (a wind-driven controller) or a touchpad or a capacitative sensing service or a Haaken Continuum or or the pads on an Ableton Live surface or, yes, a MIDI keyboard.

Pianos are a very specific type of instrument in that they have fixed pitches (compared with any non-fretted string instrument, the tuba or the human voice). MIDI has many assumptions built into it that are derived from the way pianos work, which means that using it in contexts where you want the sort of control not possible on a piano is ... challenging. One obvious example is playing something in a way closer to what you can do on a guitar: MIDI has no real way of representing the sorts of control a guitar player has access to. That said, people have tried, and the best systems are quite good, although they tend to subvert MIDI semantics and just use the syntax of the protocol.

You've got different ways of adding expression to your playing with a synthesizer, not least of which being the traditional design of having a roughly coffee-table sized control panel covered in knobs.

Why limit yourself to trying to make it work like a guitar or a saxophone? The Yamaha EWI is a lot of fun to play, but I don't really see what it adds. You can add a bit of expression to relatively crappy samples, or to some unconvincing physical modelling synthesis of a woodwind instrument, but it's never going to fool anyone. You can use it to drive other parameters on a more "conventional" (by which I mean, creating artificial sounds rather than attempting to emulate acoustic instruments) synthesizer, I guess, but how much does that really help?

I would just like to point out that an EWI can in no way reproduce a real woodwind instrument. That's because woodwinds rely to varying degrees on vocal tract resonance and other properties of the airstream. I occasionally think about how an EEG-like array of electrodes around the throat could reproduce this but lack expertise in understanding how that might happen or if it was even possible. Anyway it makes the EWI experience really disapointing for me compared to playing a real saxophone especially the big grunt that articulating and intonating a baritone sax can produce, and the totally hammed up in your face emotionality possible on the soprano sax.

128 position CCs really hurt you when you want to tune something requiring exact value like filter to specific frequency. Some expanded to the hack of using 2 CC values to control one parameter but that's hit and miss.

Per-note modulation is only slowly getting there and severely sub-optimal (MPE is using a channel per note, cutting down number of devices you can drive from single MIDI port significantly).

Now I would say "hobbled" is overstatement, but it definitely have annoying parts that we have to deal with for decades now.

On top of that there are the usability issues, uni-directionality and simple protocol made it easy to make peripherals in the 80's but nowadays it's liability, because simple thing like "ask the device what CC it accepts and what they are named" is impossible in standard

> Some expanded to the hack of using 2 CC values to control one parameter but that's hit and miss.

It's not a hack, it's part of the original MIDI specification.

Here's the thing. You never need to tune a filter to an exact frequency.

If you do, you need to design an instrument with an incredibly precise and stable filter, and analogue synthesizers don't have that.

No, you just need to widdle the knob till it is in range you want. If knob have too little detents you can't widdle it close enough to what you want. Granted, 14 bit CC is near enough but support in implementations is kinda spotty, and, well, it does eat twice as much CC.

Shove it into a synth that have a bunch of oscillators, filters, LFOs and effects [1] and you'd probably be forced to downgrade few of those parameters back to 7 bit

* [1] https://midi.user.camp/d/waldorf/blofeld/

The Juno 106 has something like a semitone and a third, and no-one complains about its cutoff control being "steppy". Indeed, everyone holds it up as a paragon of smooth and progressive response.

There's actually a very clever reason for this, and if you study the circuit diagram and the voice card firmware you'll see just how clever it is.

That's the problem. If you want to make something that isn't piano like, you run right into a brick wall -- there's no way to send the note information you want to send in a way that's understood by any random MIDI synth. That makes it much more difficult to be successful.

Recently expressive instrument makers have settled on MPE as a workaround. That works, but it's kind of kludgy and isn't widely supported. You can also use an MPE-like approach on synths that don't explicitly support it as long as they're multitimbral.

Unfortunately there's a lot of amazing synths out there that aren't multitimbral.

Recent controllers that use MPE include the Linnstrument, the Roli Seaboard, the Haken Continuum, the Expressive E Osmose, and the NuRad wind controller.

There's no reason we couldn't have had violin-style synths, for example -- continuously changing volume and pitch as the note plays, for example.

Or synth woodwinds that encoded not just fixed pitches (from the keys), but continuously changing airflow and breathiness.

You can come up with examples for pretty much every instrument, really. Imagine what you could accomplish with a synth guitar that allowed you to bend pitches.

If MIDI had supported features like that, we may very well have seen an explosion in creativity of different types of synthesizers, beyond just digital pianos and drum kits.

Fortunately we might actually see that now, with MIDI 2.0 [1]. A quote:

> This should mean music played on MIDI 2.0 instruments will feel more analog, and make it possible for non-keyboard instruments to work better with MIDI. Historically, guitar, violin, and trumpet players have had to learn play keys in order to better translate their work through MIDI. Now, hopefully, they will be able to play their instrument of choice as an input into MIDI-compatible recording software.

[1] https://qz.com/1788828/how-will-midi-2-0-change-music

Well yes, there are, the sensors for wind instruments or bowed string instruments are really hard to get right.

Never mind bowing, look at plucked string instruments - there aren't any really successful guitar synths that are actually playable to any real degree. The old Roland analogues in the 80s did the best job using a hexaphonic pickup and six PLLs to track the string frequency but they still didn't track well on lower notes, which is why Pat Metheny plays so far up the neck.

The dominance of keyboards as synth controllers is partly because of the keyboard-centric MIDI universe. It wasn't necessarily so.

One of the reasons for this, I imagine, is the piano-centric nature of a lot of (amateur) music since 1800 or so. In small settings, a single woodwind or even a violin isn't all that useful. When you're targeting amateur musicians (a vastly larger group than professionals), basing yourself off a piano keyboard is a good bet as most of them will at least be familiar with it.

Voltage is always an alternative to MIDI’s limitations.

Of course it is not a free lunch.

Roland and Sequential. Otherwise, point well made.

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