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MIDI is pretty limited by fluffy (3.00 / 3) #31 Sat Apr 12, 2008 at 06:02:31 PM EST

It was designed with a very keyboard-centric view of things, and really the vast majority of instruments can't really be expressed well in MIDI. MIDI itself doesn't store any sound data, and trombones don't have discrete notes (and MIDI's workarounds for that are hacky and poorly-designed, and even something as simple as a glissando over the whole scale is unlikely to come out right) and there's a bit more subtlety to the notes themselves than just how hard they were played (MIDI does have a 'breath control' channel but it's not really specific to anything).

Even if you did somehow capture everything that goes into a trombone performance, you'd then have to deal with how to actually synthesize it on playback, which is surprisingly non-trivial.

Basically, the best way to capture a trombone performance is with a microphone into a digital audio file.
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This is true by Herring (4.00 / 1) #33 Sun Apr 13, 2008 at 06:39:17 AM EST

Alo, with a keyboard (and MIDI), you can't raise the volume of a note after it's started playing - which you can do with any stringed or sind instrument. OK, you get a swell pedal on most church organs, but that raises the volume of everything.

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: MIDI doesn't even fully cover a real piano by fluffy (4.00 / 2) #35 Sun Apr 13, 2008 at 12:03:05 PM EST

The damper pedal is just on and off, rather than a continuous motion like on a real thing. It doesn't matter most of the time but it's nice to be able to do a nice fizzly slow muting of the strings or whatever. Same goes for the individual keys, as well.
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