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ear pain

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

Re: ear pain

Reply #1 –
Hi Rudolf.
Welcome to the Noteworthy Composer Forum

Two definitions of "hard" come to mind.  If you would agree with the sentence, The harder I press the keys on the piano, the harder the sound is, then the problem is in the dynamics.  By default, playing the keyboard manually with a normal touch would keep you well below the fff dynamic.  But NoteWorthy Composer defaults to fff, which is known as 127 by MIDI unless you put in dynamics.  Even if, in NWC2, you change the dynamic velocities on the itree, it still defaults to 127 when you haven't put a dynamic in.  This has been described a few times on this forum as "bang, bang, bang."  So, the solution during playback is to make sure you have at least one dynamic on each staff.  Recording, I'm less familiar with.  Others will have to fill you in there.

If, on the other hand, your definition of hard is closer to a description of the warmth of the sound, then the culprit may be your speakers.  The late, great Fred Nachbaur mentioned that he used vacuum tube speakers rather than the transistor speakers attached to most computers.  As my physics teacher confirmed, even though transistors represent a technological breakthrough, vacuum tubes are still used for their better sound quality, which he described as less sharp and warmer than the sound you get from transistors -- ie, the sound is not as hard.  Solution: clear two big spaces next to your computer and find yourself a par of vacuum tube speakers.

HTH
Sincerely,
Francis Beaumier
Green Bay, WI

Re: ear pain

Reply #2 –
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.

Re: ear pain

Reply #3 –
Hi Rudolf
Although I now have a Casio WK1200, I noticed exactly the same phenomenon a few years ago when I first started to play back NWC/MIDI files through a Roland Sound Canvas.  With the Roland keyboard it sounded fine, but with NWC/MIDI files it sounded very harsh and metallic - "Bang, bang, bang," as Francis said.  I even asked a service engineer to check out the Sound Canvas!  Then I realised it was because I had not introduced any dynamics into the NWC files, so that all the parts were at maximum volume (127 in MIDI) and maximum velocity (fff in NWC).  I find a good starting point is to set the piano part at Volume = 127 and Dynamic = mp, and balance the other instruments around this.
Graham

Re: ear pain

Reply #4 –
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.

Re: ear pain

Reply #5 –
For the moment, forget the keyboard, and forget the music software. Just have a look at a MIDI file. Grab a few MIDIs from here and there, and play them through your default player (Windows Media Player?) Do you still hear the harshness?

Some wavetable synth MIDI players, particularly the inexpensive kind that are built into many computers without a sound system upgrade (and virtually all laptops), do indeed produce a harsh sound for many instruments. If you record the sound output to a WAV file and look at a note in a spectrum analyzer, you will see that a narrowly-defined fundamental and narrowly-defined harmonics are present. This is very different than a live instrument, which has frequency components not on pitch.

If that's the case for you, then you should find a different way to play back MIDI. This is discussed in many other places on this forum, and much of it is system-specific, so I won't say more here.

Still, don't forget those dynamics!

Re: ear pain

Reply #6 –
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!

Re: ear pain

Reply #7 –
As judged from listening, the playback of a recording using NWC and the Casio WK-3000 is at equal dynamics as "clean" as the manual playing but clearly much "harder."

A Midi file of e.g. harpsichord music by W. Byrd sounds pretty good to me and is not "harsh" at all on my computer-setup (Window Media Player, Window Xp, PC Compaq Presario 8000), but clearly not as good as one of my a top-quality CDs with harpsichord music by J.S.Bach.

Recording of my own music (classical solo harp) from the  headphone-outlet of the Casio using headphones and a Samson C01U USB-plug-in-Microphone sounds pretty good, but the harp clearly having a "hard" sound.

Transferring this music onto a CD and playing it on my stereo-system (including "vacuum tubes") produces a nice but nevertheless rather "hard" sound.
 

Re: ear pain

Reply #8 –
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