Hello everybody, my name is Rudolf. Being rather new to the area of electronic music I first would like to thank you all for the information and advice I was able to pick up at this forum.

Here my questions: Having worked rather intensively with NWC and a Casio WK-3000 keyboard for about 2 months my ears started increasingly to hurt. The reason is likely the rather "hard" but otherwise clear sound of the Casio-keyboard. The hardness of the sound appears to be more pronounced using NWC installed on the PC than playing the keyboard manually. Has anybody made similar observations with this or other keyboards ? Would e.g. a Yamaha S90 present a better choice than the Casio WK-3000 ? And if so, have the Yamahas S90 resp. S90 ES a good "classical" or "12-string" guitar ?

Best to all, Rudolf

If you browse around the Internet for MIDI files (numerous sources), you will discover that the majority of them have maximum volume. I presume that the various enthusiasts entered pitches and durations, but not any other information.

Thanks for the replies so far,

to introduce proper dynamics in the NWC files and to address the quality of the loudspeakers as mentioned by Francis and Graham are clearly most important to improve the quality of the playback.

Dynamic under control and even "filtering" it trough "vacuum tubes" the "harsh metallic" sound still remains a problem. It did not have a chance to look at other key-boards yet, in fact I would be very happy to have first the opinions of people eventually very knowledgeable about this problem.

I was assuming Rudolf was playing back his NWC/MIDI files through his Casio keyboard - in which case, if he attends to the dynamics etc. it should be possible to get exactly the same sounds as he gets when he plays his keyboard manually.
However, Rudolf, if it is the case that you do not like the native sounds of the Casio keyboard, I suggest you look into the possibility of using soundfonts - or at the very least install a good software synthesizer (Roland or Yamaha) - in your computer, and use your Casio keyboard as a MIDI controller keyboard for playback through your computer (hooked up to your hi-fi system).  I believe there is information in the forum about where to get the Yamaha soft-synth. That might be a cheaper and more acceptable option than buying a new keyboard!

Greetings -

I think as long as you stay in the MIDI realm, you will always get "hard-sounding" music.  I think this has more to do with the fact that in MIDI, every note is "hit", and generally, it is hit exactly the same way every time.  Yes, you can overcome some of this by using the multi-point controller in NWC to achieve pitch bends and what-not, but you will never truly get, for example, a guitar to sound "real", since MIDI doesn't really do pull-offs, hammer-ons, bends, slides, and everything else you do to make it sound interesting.  You will never be able to get the sound of your thumb hitting the bass note, but then maybe your different sounding finger nails strumming the higher notes.  MIDI will just pluck, pluck, pluck each note with the same pick the same way everytime.

Even a piano, which is a "hammered" instrument, will never truly sound exactly right, because you won't achieve all the overtones and most likely will never have enough velocity layers to achieve the nuances of a piano performance.  And even with sampled instruments, it is just that.  When you play the "D" next to middle "C", for example, it's not necessarily even a recording of the "D" string playing; it's probably just the "C" string raised a whole step from software.  The further you get away from the source note, the worse it sounds.

But this is what you get in the ever-present trade-off of cost, performance, memory requirements, system resources, etc.

As was mentioned, use of dynamics (with a combination of volume, expression, and velocity), as well as articulations (legato, staccato, etc.), can help, but you will never totaly eliminate the "hardness" of the music.  And sculpting a song note-by-note can become a very tedious process.

I've just accepted that that's the way MIDI sounds, and more and more I find I just view it as its own instrument with a unique sound that sounds sort of like a real instrument of the same name, but will never achieve the actual sound of the real instrument.  But since I will never play all those other instruments that go into my arrangements (and even if I could, couldn't do them all at the same time), and since my friends pretty much play the same limited selection of instruments as I do, then MIDI gives me the chance to create some great music that, while not completely true to a live performance, can come close.  And my MIDI bass player never gets drunk and fails to show up for a gig.

Anyway, that's my $0.02 worth.

- John