3 ms·
On this matter I must say for playing music live that the 127 steps provides a great deal of resolution. Good enough for me that I have never felt like my EWI'
by em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
On this matter I must say for playing music live that the 127 steps provides a great deal of resolution. Good enough for me that I have never felt like my EWI's breath sensor was not fine enough or that my piano's touch sensor was not fine enough or that a CC knob didn't give enough resolution when turning slowly. Though if I listen closely to an isolated note I could tell there was a difference in loudness between two neighboring velocity steps, but probably couldn't tell in a live performance setting, and I would challenge listeners to see if they could tell the difference. I would say 127 steps is "good enough" or almost is for practical purposes...But that is just my datapoint and opinion. (For comparison, the most common video format is YUV420, and that averages to 12-bits per pixel, and most screen monitors use 8-bits for each color.) Had MIDI used the top bit to flag an optional extra byte for resolution, then that would have been great.
- NateEag 5y agoI trained as a classical pianist before moving to the world of synthesizers ...and rock 'n' roll. The very few electric pianos I've played that didn't feel painfully limiting in dynamic expression were high-end instruments with a whole lot more than 127 velocity values. Similarly, I have the obscure but magnificent Nord G2X, which mostly uses MIDI for mapping physical knobs to parameters in patches, but its mod wheels are much higher resolution. I strongly prefer the mod wheels for params that cover a wide span, like filter cutoff frequency, because I can feel and hear the stair-stepping when using knobs.