Should we ditch VST/AAX instruments altogether?

[Daru925]

A song about not giving up in a thread that promotes abandonning poor vsti
What a letdown.

[jancivil]

[...]
Here is obstacle number one:
Latency and quantization.

This is two things. Counting to two looks like this: "obstacles numbers one and two".

It doesn't matter if you are an 8 grade pianist, eventually when you record your performance via midi, you'll have even the smallest amount of latency (lets even say 2ms).

If I play a guitar through an amp ten feet from me onstage, I am experiencing latency of about 10 ms.
You haven't the first clue what you're doing here. Right here in your first point in your initial post you have pretty much suicided your credibility as per an argument about the matter.

And then you'll have two choices:

Quantizing, or leaving the performance as it is, with the tiny delay.
Each option will ultimately not be 100% identical to your original performance, as it could have been if it was recorded with a real piano via microphone, or with an external synth via direct audio signal.

Doubling down on the nonsense. If you record the piano, what the mics are picking up if we're mic'ing the room at all are later aural facts - use that 10ft/10ms rule of thumb here - than the not-at all-far-from 2ms the pianist experiences between her ears and the piano soundboard.

When recording with midi, you are going to sacrifice some humanity in your performance, and any attached "fixes" are still mechanical in their nature and won't be 100% identical to your natural, instantaneous performance.

More statements of your flawed understanding of what we do and further a particular failure to check yourself believing your ad culum premises must be golden. They are shit, reflecting that derivation.

I don't quantize to correct. I literally never have done.
I occasionally use a form of quantization creatively in exploration of multiple streams of time (effecting nested tuplets essentially*). Then I seek to learn to play the concept I'm teaching myself. This leverages the piano roll editor in service of something I wouldn't quite be able to with a pencil and paper, it's a next level.
If I make mistakes due to too much latency, check it: mistakes _are_ humanity in music. You've tied yourself in hopeless knots trying to talk about things you clearly don't understand or have experience witih.
Additionally I understand rhythm and time enough to be able to manufacture a human performance drawing notes in, in some cases 100% pencil tool. So with the eg., *quantize pentuplets to a quarter triplet base in 2/2 idea there now executed, I may well find it stiff (depends on how fast it flies by). My M.O. for addressing that must be mechanical to you, but only because you don't know what you're doing.
It isn't. I work by ear, and again I have done enough piano roll editing that I have educated guesses about time, as expressed in the numbers by my {1000 ticks per 16th} display resolution in a consistent methodology. My MIDI input in performance btfw is about as human as it gets, I'm not actually a very apt keyboard player and have had to devise strategies.

Every assertion in that is wrong.

Now, unlike yourself, I will show my work. This is a piece fabricated 100% with the pencil tool in Cubase's "key editor", note-ons and a lane for velocity, and three lanes for Sus Pedal, Sostenuto Pedal, and Soft Pedal. Not actual physical pedals, note well. It has, I'm confident, plenty of human roughness to offer.
Niveau 8 Coda

[jancivil]

(that btw is one piano and one drum kit "A good record", to many may well mean a recording studio and techniques that make a record come across its best. It's ok for Queen to have done 180 overdubs for one song that cannot be recreated live, but a virtual studio approach is corrupt per se (because you understand neither).

I use virtual instruments in a DAW because I have ideas that aren't otherwise going to materialize, and I dearly want my ideas to find fruition. You have yet to properly begin the exploration. Personally I'd guess it's just as well you're as free from developing technique here as you are free from thought and reflection and checking your premises at all.

[Uncle E]

this thread just keeps on giving.

Come, Boy, come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and eat apples and play in my shade and be happy.

[Uncle E]

OMG, Bippo is Keith Richards!

“The only way to cut a band is to put the boys in a room and play, and look in each other’s eyeballs”

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ente ... 32470.html

[kraster]

They don't make classic 80s songs like this any more:

No amount of ironic 80s nostalgia will ever fool me into thinking that's anything but horrific.

The musical equivalent of a war crime.

[donkey tugger]

[...]
Here is obstacle number one:
Latency and quantization.

This is two things. Counting to two looks like this: "obstacles numbers one and two".

It doesn't matter if you are an 8 grade pianist, eventually when you record your performance via midi, you'll have even the smallest amount of latency (lets even say 2ms).

If I play a guitar through an amp ten feet from me onstage, I am experiencing latency of about 10 ms.
You haven't the first clue what you're doing here. Right here in your first point in your initial post you have pretty much suicided your credibility as per an argument about the matter.

And then you'll have two choices:

Quantizing, or leaving the performance as it is, with the tiny delay.
Each option will ultimately not be 100% identical to your original performance, as it could have been if it was recorded with a real piano via microphone, or with an external synth via direct audio signal.

Doubling down on the nonsense. If you record the piano, what the mics are picking up if we're mic'ing the room at all are later aural facts - use that 10ft/10ms rule of thumb here - than the not-at all-far-from 2ms the pianist experiences between her ears and the piano soundboard.

When recording with midi, you are going to sacrifice some humanity in your performance, and any attached "fixes" are still mechanical in their nature and won't be 100% identical to your natural, instantaneous performance.

....and further to that, and this;

I've got 1 synth workstation

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... ncy-part-1

".....It seemed sensible to start by measuring the delay between MIDI Note On data and the audio output of a few hardware synths to provide some useful comparisons with their software counterparts, so I started by plumbing in my old Korg M1. Like most hardware synths, this provides a consistent and fairly low delay that I measured at 3.2ms, which seems very good considering its 16-note polyphony. Another industry standard is Roland's JV1080, which turned in a rock-solid but slightly higher timing of 4.4ms, no doubt due to its 64-note polyphony.

These figures may surprise some of you who expect hardware to respond instantaneously, but in most cases digital synths are themselves driven by microprocessors, and although their operating system are obviously fine-tuned for real-time playing, it still takes a finite time to process everything."


Ooops...

[zerocrossing]

I just need one more plugin.

It’s wafer thin!

[Bunny_boy]

Back on topic!

[polarsky]

I ain't gonna expose my true identity haha

ronnie pickering?

[donkey tugger]

I ain't gonna expose my true identity haha

ronnie pickering?

For the non-UK people;

[RunBeerRun]

are there any spagettios pics in this thread

[vurt]

I ain't gonna expose my true identity haha

ronnie pickering?

[Bunny_boy]

[jancivil]

And then you'll have two choices:

Quantizing, or leaving the performance as it is, with the tiny delay.
Each option will ultimately not be 100% identical to your original performance, as it could have been if it was recorded with a real piano via microphone, or with an external synth via direct audio signal.

Doubling down on the nonsense. If you record the piano, what the mics are picking up if we're mic'ing the room at all are later aural facts - use that 10ft/10ms rule of thumb here - than the not-at all-far-from 2ms the pianist experiences between her ears and the piano soundboard.

When recording with midi, you are going to sacrifice some humanity in your performance, and any attached "fixes" are still mechanical in their nature and won't be 100% identical to your natural, instantaneous performance.

....and further to that, and this;

I've got 1 synth workstation

Like most hardware synths, [Korg M1] provides a consistent and fairly low delay that I measured at 3.2ms, which seems very good considering its 16-note polyphony. Another industry standard is Roland's JV1080, which turned in a rock-solid but slightly higher timing of 4.4ms, no doubt due to its 64-note polyphony.

When I first started my DAW journey 20-odd yrs ago, I did what a financial person will call doing due diligence, getting acquainted with the mechanics of our situation. Stated consistently was the concept of a reasonable goal as to low latency, 'get down as close to 10ms as you can manage'; below that is expecting more than reality tends to offer, with the general metric as I state, your electric guitar through an amplifier 10 ft away from your head = ~10ms latency. A certain sort love to brag about their situation so we'lll see "I get better than 2ms!" (which might be half or less than what actually takes place roundtrip). One foot to one milisecond is close enough to be our metric. So even a drummer on an acoustic kit has (unless placing their head closer to the source) higher than 2ms for each piece of kit, some people have floor toms or cymbals farther away.

but why am I posting? Oh right, this: "any attached "fixes" are still mechanical in their nature".
If we look at this objectively, practicing to correct our deficiencies is mechanical in its nature, playing an instrument is. When I was little, after my first exposure to a professional situation I was told to go home and practice with a metronome as my time was not solid. To do so is "mechanical in nature". So while it looks like a laudable goal to be so naturalistic as all that, time correction if we do it at all, measurement of time is by definition mechanical so it's not a meaningful statement at all.

People that can't play use the quantization a DAW offers in order to proceed at all. It's not how music sounds played by humans ever. So we press on with tempered goals. Some people are very accomplished keyboard players, but if we look at their timing against a rigid grid, it's not conforming, it never will because humans are not perfectly calibrated timepieces like that. Quantized perfection is neither a goal or_any_obstacle unless we want it to be, the latter being excuse.

We either like the *error* as is, seek to perfect what may seem gross, or rely on the machine's clock, easily satisfied (having no reality to hinder us) with that mechanism in itself. ANY correction of error is mechanical. Material reality is described by one mechanism or another per se. So I have to check my statement, yes, my fine or coarse time corrections are all mechanical in nature. If I examine my remote session rhythm guitarist's reggae offbeats, I use a machine to find out where the 'swing' actually occurred. First I have to ensure I know where ONE is. So is it 60%, 67%, 70%, have they gone all the way to dotted 8th/16th ie., 75% of the way to the next quarter note/grid. Who cares, one may ask. I do because I can correct towards (or fabricate) a result knowing something now.
Knowing anything at all involves "mechanical in nature" as nature is always described as such.