BootsnAll Travel Community

quote:

Well, it was a protocol that was invented in 1983-your mouse communicates faster with your computer than MIDI does-and it's so inaccurate. It's embarrassing that we use it, to me, in music. It can be so sloppy sounding. My friends can make tracks in MIDI-I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've sat down and shown like, "Hey look, you program a beat and lets listen to it, ok?" And I'll let them program a beat and then listen to it and I go, "Okay, let's go convert it into audio and I'm going to time correct it." And then they listen to it and they're like, "Oh god, I'm destroyed for life-I'll never be able to use MIDI again."

I mean the difference in sound is so astonishing that if you have it demonstrated to you, you just can't listen to MIDI anymore because it's so sloppy, and it's disproportionately sloppy. There's a misnomer of MIDI latency like maybe it's late. It's not late, dude. If you track sixteenth notes at 120 BPMs coming out of a brand-fucking-spanking-new synth, say the Trinity, with the Uniter Aid, hooked up to a fast Mac, and track those and look at them, you'll fucking die! You'll have one that's twenty samples late and the next one will be 300 samples early and the one after that will be 150 samples late. Now imagine exponentially multiplying that by however many tracks you've got in the song and it's just a pile of slop. It's just a joke! And the way that you hear the difference if you have, say, the time correction demonstrated for you, you hear it and go, "Oh my fucking god." It's not like some cheesey computer programmer saying (in a rather stereotypical computer programmer voice), "Uhh, you need to do this to your kickdrums to make your tracks sound cool." I mean, if you listen to it, it's like, "Holy shit this sounds better." So that's why I hate MIDI... (Brian Transeau)