esselfortium
Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting
Posts: 5268
Registered: 01-02 |
I think a significant part of what makes general midi tend to sound so flat, tinny, and fake is the lack of effects processing and the inability to modulate the sounds via filters. This is particularly true with the default Windows or Quicktime midi playback on a new computer, even with a custom soundfont.
Different types of reverb in and of themselves have a huge impact on a sound and how it fits into the mix; it makes a huge difference when an engineer has the ability to control not just the amount of reverb but also its type (room, hall, plate, spring, etc.), its decay length, how equalization is applied to it to affect the tone of the reverb, and so on. Any of that can be done in professional music software, but standard midi playback on a computer typically has either no reverb at all, or a single built-in type that can't really be controlled by the midi composer and will probably sound totally different depending on what it's being played back with.
Filtering is another thing that has a huge impact on a sound's tonality, and the lack of it hugely limits the fidelity of a standard midi file. As one example, the dubstep synths you mentioned rely hugely on filter automation (that is, programming the filter frequency and resonance to change over the course of the song), opening and closing a resonant lowpass filter (which is then processed through distortion) to make them animate and "growl".
Distorted guitars would also sound a lot better if they were played as clean guitar sounds which could then be low-pass filtered and distorted in realtime, more like an actual guitar recording is made.
Of course, all of this would increase the processor overhead of playback...
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01-03-12 17:37 
