The Miracle of Performance Modeling

MIDI Controllers

The most efficient and intuitive way to capture a musical performance for sequencing is to simply record a live musician performing on a MIDI controller. Thankfully hardware manufactures caught on to this early and seized the opportunity to provide electronic musicians with a number of useful solutions for recording MIDI data using electronic adaptations of various instruments.

The keyboard is a staple of electronic music production as well as music education and performance. Most synthesizers are built around keyboard controllers. You can buy a keyboard controller without any sound generation mechanism built in for use with external sound modules and samplers. Fatar offers a wide selection of keyboard controllers. Yamaha, Roland and Midiman offer keyboard controllers as well. Keyboards make truly versatile MIDI controllers, with many coming with their own share of additional controller and controller options, including sliders, pitchbend and modulation wheels, knobs and even ribbon controllers. They make for pretty good controllers all around but keep in that a generalized tool can limit your success in producing the most believable performance possible.

Guitarists have two options for capturing MIDI performances. A standard electric or acoustic guitar can be built with internal MIDI electronics or can be retrofitted with a special guitar synth pickup. RMC Pickups manufactures MIDI electronics for a wide range of guitars. The Parker MIDIFly and MIDIAxe from BMC Guitars are two examples of MIDI Guitars. Many guitar manufacturers will custom build a MIDI-ready guitar for you. Conklin Guitars for instance offers an interesting range of custom guitars with MIDI electronics. Yamaha and Roland provide MIDI guitar retrofitting. For more information on all things MIDI Guitar check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/midiguitar.

	MIDI-ready 8-stringer from Conklin Guitars.

MIDI-ready guitars, like this 8-stringer from Conklin Guitars, offer superior performance modeling opportunities for electronic musicians working with strummed guitar parts.

A second option for guitarists is a guitar style controller like the Ztar from Starrlabs. Not quite guitars, but they are in the same vein. They are definitely worth checking out. Guitarists aren't the only string players that can MIDI up their instruments. There are also MIDI basses and violins and even retrofittings for pedal steel guitars.

Wind and brass players have their own set of MIDI instruments available to them. They can invest in a wind controller like the WX5 from Yamaha or one of three models from Akai. Alternately brass players may be interested in hunting down a now discontinued trumpet-style EVI 1000 from Akai. These instruments give wind and brass players unprecedented control over their MIDI performances.

Another option is to use a breath controller in tandem with another MIDI controller. A breath controller like the BC-3A from Yamaha is used to control the virtual breath pressure of a wind or brass performance. The performer plays the notes on the secondary controller and controls the expressiveness of the performance with the breath controller. MIDI supports breath controller data natively with continuous controller #2. Wind players interested in learning more about wind synthesis and performance capture for MIDI should check out the International Wind Synthesis Homepage and the EWI/EVI website.

Triggering sounds and interpreting velocity information is fairly easy to do, so drummers and percussionists have a range of quality instruments available to them. Roland has really pushed the envelope for drum controllers with their V-Drums and V-Cymbal series. They offer a number of electronic drum kits over a range of price points. There are also percussion controllers available from Roland. Yamaha makes electronic drum kits as well. An alternative to the expensive MIDI drum kits are MIDI triggers. These are electronic sensors attached to drums that send MIDI messages when excited.

Aside from the run of the mill MIDI versions of traditional instruments there are alternative electronic instruments that give electronic musicians new methods to express themselves. Some of them are pretty wild, like brainwave to MIDI converters. Others are more practical like XYZ-pads, pedals and knobs. Vocalists are even able to capture aspects of their performances using pitch-to-MIDI converters. There are a lot of options for crafting your performance data before it even hits your sequencer. Check out Starrlabs's page, the Surface One from MidiMan and the ExpressionMate from Kurzweil and anything with a D-beam on it from Roland for some examples.

There are some negative aspects of working with MIDI controllers. First off they aren't for everyone. If you need to record a flute solo and you don't play a woodwind, a wind controller probably isn't'going to do you much good. Second, they can be expensive investments, much more so than software solutions. Third they are generally limited in their capabilities to deliver believable performances across a wide range of instrument families. Lastly, part of the power of MIDI lies in the fact that you can edit performance parameters after the fact. Don't discount the power of editing MIDI data just because you pulled off a pretty decent rendition of your performance.