Originally Posted by John Lawrence Schick
Then again, all recorded music is no longer acoustic/ live music. All recorded music has to route through different playback devices (amplification and speakers). Even “live” music is altered by its acoustic environment. I think of MIDI instruments as recorded/ sampled “live” instruments. There’s a world of sounds out there. I appreciate them all. I once had a violin major, fresh out of music school, ask me who played the violin on one of my tracks. She said that violinist had so much feeling and expression. She was impressed with the sound the violinist got out of his violin. Wanted to know what violin he used. I told her it was a Kirk Hunter violin. laugh

Moral of the story... "if it sounds good, it is good".

Best, John smile



Hi John,

I agree wholeheartedly. The one thing I dislike about Keith Jarrett is not that he occasionally stops a solo performance to chew out the audience for a camera or a hushed whisper, but because he has some kind of Gurdjieff-like belief that acoustic instruments are somehow "truer" music makers, and I just can't follow his argument.

Sample libraries can sound great. So can (modern, post 2012) BIAB which is a different paradigm altogether, being more like Sony's Acid platform that ushered in loops some twenty years ago..wow..time is flying by!

And the thing is and why I disagree with folks that say, "you just need this or that" is that BIAB compliments sample libraries because they work differently and have different strengths and thrive around different instruments. I would never use a BIAB piano front and center for instance, because from phrase to phrase, you can hear the sustain getting cut off, then starting again, and in a very unnatural way. Very annoying. But Musart's Pianoteq is a brilliant "physical modelling" software that can morph into ANY make of piano known to man, and has a footpront under 100 megabytes! And good sampled pianos (like Native-Instruments') can sound realistic too. Sampled guitars are catching up.

BIAB's main weakness is it's inability to play specific melodies. But that's the forte of sample libraries. So together, in a DAW, you've got the best of both worlds.

But if I was to be stranded on a desert island and had to choose one type of software to compliment my DAW, I'd go with sample libraries, cuz they are MUCH more versatile than BIAB. They can do BOTH chordal work and melodic work equally well, but sometimes take so much time to tweak the midi CC info that one thinks, "darn..if only BIAB had pan flute performances, I could just write the chords in BIAB and have Zamfir do the rest." wink

Mike

Last edited by Michael Zaneski; 04/11/19 10:04 PM.
Fate doesn't hang on a wrong or right choice
Fortune depends on the tone of your voice

-The Divine Comedy (Neil Hannon)
from the song "Songs of Love"
from the album "Casanova" (1996)