UPDATE: Sound Engineering & Making Music: Converting Audio to MIDI In Your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) to Perfectly Intertwine Organic and Virtual Instruments Plus a Lesson on Audio Plug-ins

I’m here in Quito, I’ve got Tom Waits on the ol’ Ipod, and it’s raining real hard. I thought I should get this rant down before the rainbows come out and start taking lives.

THE PREMISE

Basically, for the first time I think I understand where modern indie music is going, and I want to place my bets. (Mostly) all analog instruments are finished, and I want to make a guess at how they are finally going to be phased out. I bet that a sound recording program will “recreate” organically recorded music in pure perfect computer-generated tone, somewhat in the form of the current concept of MIDI.

I got this idea in my head when recently, against my will, I was forced to learn a lot about MIDI. I was surprised to learn that MIDI was actually nothing at all like what I thought and only in the last two years has it been worth a damn.

That surprised me because MIDI is very old.

PROBLEMS OF NOW

MIDI belongs to the piano, and to classical music, but things changed, the piano became the synthesizer, the synthesizer became the MIDI keyboard, and now if you just say “MIDI controller” people will understand what you mean.

Many homes still have a piano in some form or another, either a child’s keyboard, or a high dollar MIDI controller, the important thing being that the piano is still a very popular instrument.

And in my experience everyone who thinks they can play the piano, also believes they are on top of this MIDI thing. Every single time this has proved untrue.

Problems arise when you meet a person who plays a MIDI keyboard and you try to record a song together. You will eventually figure out that they have no clue how to control their software.

This has always frustrated me.

One, because the software is such an important part of their instrument that it IS their instrument.

Two, because I always thought they wanted me to learn their software for them, like it’s ONLY a software issue, like it’s my problem, like I care how their keyboard software works, when I can’t even play the keyboard.

And three, we always ended up recording their keyboard live through analog. I felt a little bad about it, as I knew it stripped the power of MIDI out of their instrument, but I didn’t know what to do about it, nor did they.

What I learned in the last few weeks is that MIDI for most of its life has been really weak, and when I recorded a MIDI keyboard as if it were a synthesizer, unknowingly that was the best I do at the time.

Everyone spoke of MIDI as magical and I didn’t know any better so I believed them.

But what’s magical? You can record a musical line, then play it back with different instrumentation, and also edit the musical line itself.

THE LIMITATIONS OF MIDI

Here is what you couldn’t do until recently – kick out the jams, motherfu*ker. You couldn’t jam, you couldn’t interact with other live organic instruments, while recording live.

In order for MIDI to be incorporated into a modern recording with voice or a live instrument it had to be completely finished and locked down, then the organic components could be added on top of it. I’m sorry, but that’s not how modern contemporary music is created.

This is why MIDI has always been pushed away from the mainstream, and why the classical music crowd has always embraced it. It’s perfect for old dead perfectly notated music.

THE NEW EVOLUTION OF MIDI

Most people who have a MIDI controller don’t understand the new power that’s opening up to them.

Ok, what’s changed? The software, but it’s all software.

Three major software developments have changed the world of MIDI.

The first was that (cheap or free) virtual instruments became so perfect that no one could tell the difference between a real and a fake. That is, MIDI tells the computer to play this music with a grand piano and the grand piano is so life-like the only way to tell that it is most likely MIDI is that it is TOO WELL RECORDED.

The second was that multi-track recording programs (GarageBand, Adobe Audition, etc.) rethought the way MIDI should be incorporated into the recording process. Why not treat it like any other instrument, let it be recorded live with other live instruments?

I always thought this was the case, as it should have been, but it’s actually quite new.

Of the sound recording programs with which I’m familiar, the first one with this feature was GarageBand. Adobe Audition 3, which is still only a few months old, added this feature mainly just in response to GarageBand.

I know nothing about Pro Tools and hopefully never will, as I don’t like their dependence on hardware. I don´t know anything about Logic 8, but hear good things about it.

While it sounds like GarageBand might be an innovator, I can’t recommend it. I find a new reason to hate GarageBand every day, while at the same time I find new reasons to like Adobe Audition.

That’s how I finally stand on the GarageBand Vs. Adobe Audition debate.

The third development was that all of the amplifier modeling software and after effects (like software EQ, software hardlimiters, all the professional stuff, etc.) got better than their physical counterparts.

Now, even with endless money to spend, after music is in a computer there is no reason that it should leave for any reason. This means that organic sound and MIDI have finally come together in the same place at the professional level.

That’s it. This new software and it’s new potential for MIDI isn’t very old.

WHY MIDI WILL RULE MUSIC

Recently, I saw someone working on an electronic music album. I even wrote a song with them and in the process saw their music making routine, which was new to my style.

The problem came when, during our song-making attempt, I wrote the guitar part first. Now, what? The MIDI has to interact with an organic instrument.

The programs like GarageBand and Adobe Audition could have handled it, but this person was using high-end software from the MIDI tradition.

After two weeks, they figured it out. They used Ableton Live “rewired” with Reason 4. These are two expensive programs from different software companies made to work together in tandem.

Remember, software that allows for interaction of organic and MIDI instruments is relatively new. I thought it was a hack, but it worked.

And when I saw how well it worked, I started pondering my faith.

I play guitar, and I was very jealous of what they had. Imagine being able to record a performance in a perfectly pure way, then if you hit a wrong string, or just wanted to make a small change, it was only a mouse click away, and that edit would become as good as if you had played it that way.

Powerful stuff.

But this person was in the stages of “mastering” their album. In the processes of working on our song I saw the waveform of one of their MIDI tracks and it was perfect already! What was there to master?

Why would a computer spit out a track derived from computer-generated sounds in any form less than perfect? How could it be morally culpable to let the track hit the peaker? If you don’t mess with it, MIDI is perfection itself.

The last thing is that there are no microphones involved. You don’t know what a blessing that is. Microphones are usually the give away of a non-professional recording.

Every MIDI instrument is always a perfectly mic’ed instrument, that is quite priceless in a production value sense.

I’m still waiting for an omni-directional USB microphone with a frequency response of 20-20k Hz. Even if MXL or another company finally releases one, it will still only produce the same old uneven recordings that are the nature of analog (with unintended car noses in the background probably).

The perfection of a computer-generated tone will break a sound engineer’s heart.

That’s why I’m packing up the analog instrument tent and giving up.

THE WORLD DOES NOT END WITH THE MAYAN CALENDER IN 2012; IT ENDS WITH THE STOCK MARKET CRASH IN 2008

I look at it this way, when I was learning to play guitar 10 years ago, I thought I needed all kinds of musical equipment that I couldn’t afford. The one solace in later life is that it all proved unnecessary, if I had been able to buy it, I would have just been throwing my money away.

Case and point: guitar amplifiers. I always wondered why my $80 practice amp (in 1998) never sounded like any guitars I heard on the radio. I always thought it was that I didn’t spend enough; I didn’t know anything about sound engineering at the time.

Now, everything has come full circle, and I think it’s a joke. If you want to spend two grand on a high-end amplifier today, guess what, it is just a computer with a large speaker mimicking what it thinks high-end amplifiers sound like.

Let me explain it this way, guitar amplifier modeling software has gotten so good, that real amplifiers now use it to create the sound that the software was supposed to be mimicking. It’s great, it allows for presets and so on. The point? You can buy the two thousand dollar amp or you can plug your guitar into your home computer, and your computer will give you more options.

So, acoustic guitars made out of endangered trees, the fine details between an American versus a Mexican made Stratocaster, expensive cables, all of that proved pointless. Plug in your guitar, record it, add a little reverb, and now tell me how much the equipment cost?

Sorry to have to tell you this, but if you can’t entertain a group of people with a $99 student guitar, you won’t be any more entertaining with a $7000 pre-war martin. It takes a long time to learn that but it’s true.

THE APOCALYPSE (Organic Instruments are MIDI)

Organic instruments for final playback are dead. MIDI recreations of those instruments are so much better, and there can be only one.

I’m a guitar player, not a great one, but I enjoy it, and I realize that I am never going to learn to play the piano. That may sound sad, but I’ve had plenty of time to get over it.

I wanted to know how could I get in on this MIDI thing?

I’ve spent time on the Internet trying to figure this out. People have come up with a few different options—

I could buy a “MIDI Guitar.” Companies are out there that are selling guitars with no strings, only buttons along the fret board. These are not cheap, start around $1500, and I can’t see how they could possible play anything like a guitar. Not for me.

Then there are aftermarket add-ons, essentially unique pick-ups that you attach to your guitar that goes to a computer. The computer tries to read the notes you are playing and converts them to MIDI. This technology is a little more bit my style, it’s called tone-to-MIDI, but I can see through the logic. Mostly it is someone wanting to sell you the pick-up, because a guitar pick-up no matter how unique is just a type of microphone.

So, my next google search was simply “audio to MIDI” and I hit the jackpot.

Everything now is just software of course, and what I found were dozens of programs both freeware and not, that try to convert audio to MIDI. Some say they can do it in real time. I tried a few of them and found out that they worked with my guitar, but with errors.

As it turns out tone-to-MIDI technology is not that advanced, and a guitar is very demanding instrument for the software, it spits out notes faster than a piano, it is always slightly out of tune, much of the time there are six individual notes playing, good guitaring is about some really subtle movements, and the software just doesn’t record and sample fast enough. All of this is problematic.

100 MILLION DOLLAR ADVICE FOR ADOBE AND APPLE

Get that tone-to-MIDI software working right and incorporate it into the next releases of GarageBand and Audition.

It might take some work, I can see it being a little like voice recognition technology. The musician might have to teach the software how to listen to their instrument. The software might ask you to play some common chords for example. It could be processor intensive and unrealistic in real time, but it would change the face of modern music.

Imagine being able to play an old beat up guitar, mandolin, trumpet, kazoo, clarinet, violin, or saxophone into an old beat up microphone, and after some calculations the software will convert it, and give you the most angelic perfectly recorded piece of music you ever laid down.

That’s the potential.

Every organic instrument could already be a MIDI controller.

MIDI is only going to get more powerful, and the number of life-like virtual instruments grows everyday.

Imagine, Apple puts this into GarageBand… one day a college kid practices the drums on a practice mat in his dorm room (you know, a bunch of different circles to hit that make slightly different sounds, but quieter than a drum kit, or maybe just set up coffee cans), his MacBook is recording nearby with its built in microphone, the kid hits a button and his practice session is converted into the most perfectly mic’ed drums ever. Drums have a reputation as the most difficult instrument to mic, it’s not for amateurs.

Apple could even brand and sell the drum practice mat; they love that kind of thing.

Or you find a virtual instrument pack that mimics yodeling. You yodel into a microphone, the computer will measure pitch and length and then give you perfect yodels to your specification. It won’t sound like you, but it would if you could yodel.

Well, that’s the future as I see it.

There might be some people uncomfortable with this; they might argue that all music would sound the same if everyone used the same set of virtual instruments for example, or they might be uncomfortable with how “un-genuine” the music is.

But after post-production things get changed so much even the same virtual instrument would not sound any more similar than one acoustic guitar compared with another. And anyone who is concerned with how fake music is getting, should realize that for a long time now, algorithms have existed to keep music in pitch and in tempo.

It’s possible that someone who could barely play his or her instrument or can’t really sing laid down a million dollar track. But I hoped they at least had style.

AFTERWARDS: THE ACOSTIC GUITARS AND THE COCKROACHES

Beating on an old acoustic guitar is a lot of fun, and it always will be. The guitar as a musical instrument is going to go in and out of fashion, but I will always be a guitar player. I bet there are plenty of people out there who feel the same way about their organic instrument, no matter what that instrument may be.

That being said, in the recording process, organic instruments don’t hold a candle to computer generated virtual instruments. If tone-to-MIDI software were improved, it could lead to generating music of the highest production value, from instruments of the lowest, and that is the Do-It-Yourself spirit. With one click of a mouse, you could finally have your million-dollar studio.

3-2-1 Watch for the flash.

-J Roland Kelly