Midi Controller/Synth?... please help!

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G'day Everybody,

Am just after some advice on what I should be looking at buying. Not all that familar with keyboards, have played on $50 casio's pretty much all my life.
I'm a songwriter who has recently began setting up a little home studio.

I own a behringer umx61 midi controller and am currently using this for vsti's, however really need an upgrade.

My question is... can I buy a synth like a juno g and still use it like I would a midi controller - can I use my vsti's like bfd2?
If the answer is yes is it even worthwhile buying a synth if all i'm really after is vsti's?
Alternatively, should I try for a top range midi controller with weighted/semi weighted keys instead of a synth?

I love the feel of piano's and the use of the expression pedals so am wondering if anybody can point me in the direction of something similar that I can use with vsti's?

It's conflicting though, as much as I love weighted keys and classical piano, I'm also after fast paced/light fingered synth action... Is there an inbetween that would suit my needs?

Is there a synth with awesome sounds that I would want to use (think dream theater/mr bungle/orchestral/bass), semi weighted keys, vsti compatability so I can use philharmonik/bfd/absynth/steinway? Just simply EVERYTHING I could ever dream of in a product..?. or am I indeed just dreaming and better off buying a midi controller and just shutting up?
Like I said... I really am quite the novice on all this

ALSO... any suggestions with vsti's? What do you guys use if any at all...

Not really too concerned with budget as it will be a joint buy but something reasonable, around $1000 - $1500 US?

Really appreciate all your time, no doubt these questions have been answered a billion times previously so if you would like to simply point me to a link that would be fine! :)

Thanks and Regards

Rohan

 
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Ok, you need to know the distinction between a proper synth (the Juno series is arguably *not*, despite Roland's advertising), and other types of keyboards. A synth generates certain waves and operates on them to create sound. A workstation keyboard uses audio samples (sometimes acting on them in ways that a synth would, which is why the Juno series is labelled as a synth by Roland) to create the audio.

If you're wanting orchestral sounds, you're almost certainly wanting a workstation keyboard, not a synth.

As for what to get? There aren't any workstation keyboards I'm aware of that have a good semi-weighted feel. The Korg M50 is semi-weighted but didn't feel natural to me when I tried it (probably because I'm used to the semi-weighted feel on my Nord Stage, which probably has the feel you want but is out of your price range and is good for B3, piano/electric piano/clavinet, and basic synth sounds but nothing else). I'd look at the Korg M50 and the Yamaha MO6 and MO8 (the same sound; 61 vs 88 keys, and the MO8 has weighted keys while the MO6 has synth action). If you can't find a semi-weighted keyboard you like, I'd suggest an 88-key weighted keyboard over a 61-key synth action; it's generally easier to play fast synth leads on a weighted controller than to play good piano parts on a synth-action controller.

Virtually all workstations on the market today will work as a MIDI controller for your computer. Most do this through either MIDI input and output on the keyboard (you'll need two MIDI cables and a MIDI interface or audio interface with MIDI in and out; a 1x1 MIDI interface is quite cheap, should be well under $50), or by sending MIDI to and from the keyboard over a USB connection.

Do you need a workstation? Depends on how you make music. If you do a lot of live performance and don't have a laptop, you'll definitely need one. If you only make music using your computer, you're probably better off getting a better MIDI controller (M-Audio's Axiom series has a great semi-weighted feel if you can do with 61 keys or less; really, M-Audio is the go-to company for controllers) and a new VST or two to add to your sounds. If you don't have much orchestral but also want a variety of other sounds, I highly recommend Native Instruments' Kontakt 3.

As for what VSTs I use, the commercial ones are in my signature; I can recommend some good free ones to serve various purposes.
 
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I really can't add anything to Kanthos's sage advice, as it is spot on (per usual).

At this point, play a number of workstations and midi controllers and see which ones feel good to you.

At some point, one will stand out and you'll connect with. That's the one to buy, assuming its in your budget.

Good luck and let us know what you arrive at.

Cheers.
 
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Thanks for all the advice! That helps alot and have been using youtube to check out some of the different midi controllers and workstations you suggested. I'll have to spend a couple of weekends browsing stores and trying a few out. Thanks again for all your help and will let you know.
Kanthos - could you please suggest some decent vsti's? free or not...?
Thanks again, appreciate it.
 
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I went poking around Guitar Center (oddly enough) playing all the keyboards. Ho Hum, until I got to the Roland Juno Stage. I love the feel of that thing. It reminded me of my old JX-10 (though I hope it doesn't suffer from keys going out like mine; something in the rubber strip under the keys was a known issue with Roland). I *can't stand* the Roland pitch wheel/mod "lever" though.

I don't know of a controller that has that same feel.

As far as weighted, I lucked into a good deal on a StudioLogin 990 pro. If you can find one used, they are pretty nice (though playing synth parts on the thing isn't too much fun :D)
 
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Tell me what kind of VST you want (synth of some sort? Going for a particular instrument sound? Effects) and I can help point you in the right direction. Also, take a look at this. It's a post from a friend of mine on his music blog with all kinds of free music software, including plugins.

Commercial ones I've tried that I can recommend:

Native Instruments:

Kontakt 3 - A good mix of orchestral and other sounds, plus a great sampler if you need that kind of thing

Kore 2 - Fantastic for live performance, great as a way to collect, organize, and manipulate sounds across multiple plugins. If you don't get this, definitely get the free Kore Player and the free Best of Kore Compilation soundpack; the Kore Player is scaled down and doesn't host VSTs itself, but still is quite worthwhile.

B4-II: Arguably the best organ VST out there; has great hammond B3/C3, Vox Continental, and Farfisa sounds.

Elektrik Piano: Great Rhodes, Wurlitzer, and Clavinet sounds

NI Synths: FM8 (advanced FM synthesis), Absynth (great atmospheric textures, among other things), Massive (subtractive sunth)

Battery - Drum sampler

Guitar Rig: Great if you're going to record guitar, although there are cheaper or free plugins for some effects.


Other than Native Instruments, everything else I use that's commercial is Sylenth (classic analog synth), Arturia Prophet V (Prophet 5 and Prophet VS emulation), and ManyStation Upright Bass.
 

daz

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Hey all...

Im the other half of Rohans team so I thought I would wade into this discussion.

You have all been brilliantly helpful, thanks ever so much. This might be slightly off topic for the website but you've been very helpful.

Article contents:
- Our Music Creation Process (cubase and midi)
- Music Creation Tools
- Our Music Production Process (cubase and audio files)
- Music Production Tools
- Kore 2 trial and concerns
- Inspire 1349 DI
- Know of a decent Bass VSTi?
- Any Gibson guitar VSTi reviews?

Currently we are looking into creating quality output from MIDI files. This is for demo purposes (mp3s on myspace etc)

For each instrument we get the midi (recorded from keyboard or another program) and load it into CuBase. From there we assign a VST instrument, level the sound and export to an audio file. Repeat this for each instrument.

The VSTs we are using for this are:
- BFD2 for drums
- RealGuitar / RealStrat for guitar
- Miroslav Philharmonit for orchestra
- Jazzbaby... i think its that one? (free good sounding piano)
- Absynth
- FM8

The next step is to load all the audio files back into cubase and apply any filters / plugins etc, adjust and level the sound again.

Plugins and filters we are using here are:
- Guitar Rig 2
- Cubase filters (reverb etc)


We then output this to an audio file for use with vocals. This is done in the bathroom through the Inspire box into Cubase. We export that to an audio file.

The last part is to bring this all together again in cubase and add the final mix to get the right levels. Output that and there is the final product.

Does anyone have an opinion on better products or a better process?

I downloaded the trial version of Kore 2 and it isnt being nice to me when i use an existing midi file. Finally got a sound out of it yesterday and it was rubbish, no matter which sample i selected as output. Is this because its a trial version or do you think i am using it wrong? (happy to describe that process if there is interest).

Rohan and I are slightly perfectionist in our approach. I have an inspire 1349 that records good vocal output but average quality output for bass. This isnt working for us. Its also not as flexible inside cubase if we restructure the midi files.
Can you recommend a bass VSTi? I need one similar to RealGuitar so that cubase will play the note from the midi file instead of just adding an effect onto an existing sound. l I have heard of Broomstick bass and also virtual bassist but dont know where to download a trial. I will try out the "ManyStation Upright bass" above. Is it an electric bass emulator? Free VSTi's would be great of course but we will spend money to get a good result.

Roh plays a gibson and the RealGuitar / RealStrat progam isn’t bad (esp with guitar rig over the top), but i have seen a Gibson equivalent on the net. Does anyone know anything about that? I have heard a demo but there is no downloadable version for me to try that I can find. I wont buy it until i get reviews or i can try it.

I'll talk to Roh about uploading an MP3 so you can get a handle on the quality we are pumping out. You may be able to give us advice on how to improve our quality.


Please note that all this is for demo recording only. We have a completely different strategy for playing live (and it will involve a yet to be found drummer! lol)

Thanks very much for your time, you guys are seriously gold!

D
 
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I do have an opinion on better process. Why are you recording everything to MIDI and using VSTs when you have some instruments that you guys can play live? You'll get far better results by recording Roh's guitars directly through the Inspire rather than looking for a VST to emulate them, both in terms of quality (for rhythm parts, the amount of work it takes to realistically program strumming in MIDI is huge) and in sound. And with the setup you have, since you already have Guitar Rig, you wouldn't even have to worry about an amp or anything; plugging the guitar right into the Inspire would work fine.

Also, why bother with a MIDI file at all? Why not record your MIDI parts directly into Cubase as individual MIDI tracks as well, and route them to appropriate VSTs? I can see two advantages to doing it this way: one is that it saves the step of importing, and the other is that you're playing directly into the VST that makes the final sound, so you can make subtle or obvious changes in your playing that will directly affect the sound. Think of it this way: if I want to make an organ sound, am I going to get better sound if I record the MIDI while playing a piano patch and then play it back through an organ patch, or if I play the organ patch directly? That's maybe a more extreme example than anything you're doing (presumably, you're playing a comparable synth sound when you want FM8 or Absynth to render the audio, and so on), but in general, it will only help you to play directly into the instrument that will produce the final sound.

As for the audio side of it, my suggestion is again to use Cubase. Exporting your instrument tracks to a single audio file should be the very last thing you do (and this is the only time you should ever do it). For one thing, if you export before vocals to an MP3, there's immediate quality loss. For another, you may want to tweak volume levels at certain times on certain tracks based on what the vocals are doing; if you only have two audio tracks after you record the vocals (vocals and everything else), you can't do this.

It just seems that the way you do it now, you're jumping around a lot and creating all kinds of different files. Cubase was designed to let you record everything individually, keeping it all as separate parts; this is also the way that recording studios work, for all the same reasons. It'd be one thing if your thought was, "Oh well, it's just a demo so quality doesn't matter and we just want to do this quickly" (I'd argue that, but still...), but multiple exportings, creating a MIDI track first, and all of that will end up being *more* work than the way I've suggested.


As for your other questions:

ManyStation Upright Bass is strictly an acoustic upright and is best suited for jazz or other genres that (usually uncharacteristically) use that kind of sound. So no, it's not electric. There was, I think, an electric bass by ManyStation, but I specifically wanted a quality but affordable upright sound for jazz so I didn't look at it and can't say if it's any good or not.

Curious to know what you mean by the sound being rubbish in Kore, and what troubles you had. I don't believe the demo is sonically crippled (if I recall, Native Instruments' demos tend to limit you from saving or have a per-session time limit or only be usable for the first X days after you install or something). I know that I had no problems making a few short MIDI clips, bringing them into Kore, and using them to easily evaluate Kore sounds (although this was nearlly a year ago, so I've forgotten exactly how to do it, other than that it wasn't hard). My best guess is that you didn't have MIDI channels properly assigned to your Kore sounds; it should be easy to make one sound containing a MIDI player and a bunch more sounds with instruments and route the right MIDI channels from the MIDI player to all the other sounds.

I think that answers everything you asked last post. Good luck!
 

daz

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One reason we use this process is that we often write songs using a software program with a staff and then learn the piece later. The program we use allows us to export to MIDI easily.

We will give the DI method another go. We dont have mics for drums... nor at this stage a drummer, but the process i mentioned will be fine for this purpose.

With Kore 2, i open the program, select the input type to be midi player, load the midi file (a very simple midi), i then assign a sound (used Snoopy fingered bass just now from the 1st collection) and it sounds like noise, similar to when you press a whole heap of keys on a keyboard together. I can recognise the tune in the jumbled mess. Perhaps it is my midi file that is corrupt. I will check out some others and let you know.

D
 
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Fair enough on the process; didn't realize you guys were writing notation first. Still, I bet you'd get better-quality results playing the parts in instead of using MIDI. No notation program out there lets you capture the nuances of actual playing; you need to do the performance yourself or heavily tweak the MIDI events (subtle changes in timings and note velocities that make the performance sound more human) to get the best results.


I'm sure I know what the problem with Kore was. You had several different parts in your MIDI file, yes? Presumably on separate MIDI channels, the way a notation program would make them? When you went to play it back in Kore, you didn't do anything to tell the Snoopy Bass which channel to play back, so it tried to play back *all* of them.

What you need to do instead is open the Sound Matrix in Kore and put the MIDI player in the top-left slot. Then, add additional channels, one for each instrument in the MIDI file. On each Kore channel, put *two* things. The first is a MIDI Filter; you want to filter out any MIDI events not on a specific channel. (Odds are, your notation program numbered them with the first staff being 1, second staff being 2 and so on; drums are conventionally channel 10 for some reason). The second thing on that channel will be whatever instrument you want to play that sound.

You'll also need to do something to tell the second, third, etc. columns to get input from the first column. I can't remember off-hand how to do it, but it's a setting somewhere in the Audio/MIDI section of Kore below the sound matrix, probably on the MIDI tab, and probably labelled Input. I think you might have to go to the Input dropdown for each channel beyond the first and select the first channel as the input source, so the MIDI data played back by the player gets sent to each other channel.
 

daz

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The midi file was exported with only 1 track, and i opened it in noteworthy player to make sure. I got the same results.

Anyway, the information in your post is exactly the type info i am looking for. I added a midi filter to the mix and experimented with the different parts. Channel 1 contained the bass instrument (with the bad sound) and all other channels were empty. Also, if i turned off the notes filter no sound came out.

From this i am guessing that there is only one channel in the midi file? Anyway, i have emailed you the midi file and some screen shots. If you can get it working with that midi file and the screen shots look like i am doing it right then it must be my setup.

Thanks,

Daz
 
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You're making it sound like you've managed to export all the MIDI parts from your notation file to a single track. If Noteworthy Player plays the file "incorrectly" too, it's a problem with the file, not a problem with the player. Several different players wouldn't all make the same mistake.
 
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I came across something in the Cubase manual today that I'm certain is your problem. There are two types of MIDI files. Type 0 are those that have all the data on a single track, and Type 1 are those that have data on different tracks. You've almost certainly managed to export a Type 0 MIDI file instead of a Type 1 MIDI file. Does your notation program give you a choice between the two? Which notation program is it?
 

daz

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The program is Guitar Pro 5.

I had a look in the help and it may be that i am using multiple channels per track. (See below)

MIDI Export
Definition: MIDI - Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is a protocol, a universal language, allowing the communication of musical information between computers, synthesizers, sequencers, .... MIDI files consist of messages describing the score very precisely: notes, rhythm, instruments, .... The quality of the sound depends on the sound card.
The File > Export > MIDI menu exports the partition to a MIDI (format 1) file (.mid)
To choose not to export a track, just mute it ( button on the mix table).
Tip: Guitar Pro allows you to use 2 channels for a single track to enhance the sound restitution. Some software does not support this functionality. So if you have a problem opening Guitar Pro exported MIDI files, use a single channel per track.

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