Other Types of MIDI Controllers
If for some reason you’re completely against the idea of having a MIDI keyboard in your setup but you still want to be able to tweak your faders and knobs with Cubase remotely, there are several other directions you can go. I used to own a Tascam US-428 MIDI control surface that boasted a mini-mixer with faders and knobs and an external sound card. The new Mackie MCU Pro (see Figure 2.2) has everything you need to tweak a mix without having a built-in sound card.
Figure 2.2. The Mackie MCU Pro MIDI mixing control surface.
If you’re a DJ, a guitar player, or a drummer and you want to take full advantage of Cubase, there are several MIDI control surfaces currently on the market just for you. For DJs who want to be able to record and perform edits to the scratching (such as timing corrections and pitch bend), check out control surfaces such as the Vestax VCI-100 (see Figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3. The Vestax VCI-100: a MIDI control surface for DJs.
For drummers who want to use their skills to the fullest in Cubase, one of the best (and pretty standard) options around is a set of Roland V-Drums. The important thing to realize is that you aren’t limited to the sounds that come with MIDI drum kits. In fact, if you use the MIDI kit appropriately, you can bypass the MIDI drum kit’s internal sounds completely. Even though most drummers I know are purists when it comes to playing on particular kits, there are several very valuable reasons to use a MIDI drum kit when recording. The biggest reason is, you don’t need to spend hours getting drum sounds. Most of the time, in order to achieve a desired acoustic drum recording, a drummer must set up the drums in a properly tuned room, tune the drums perfectly, and then find proper microphones to use on each drum and enlist the services of a great engineer to get the perfect drum mix. With a set of MIDI drums, you can simply plug a MIDI cable into your computer and start recording in Cubase. If you don’t like the sounds you used at the time you recorded, you can change them later! Another benefit is automatic quantizing of drum parts. For instance, let’s say there was a part where the drummer played a kick drum a little off beat, but the rest of the track was perfect. Instead of retaking a section, you could simply quantize the kick drum to fall in the appropriate place. You’ll learn more about quantizing within Cubase in Chapter 8, “Basic Editing.” When shopping for a MIDI kit, the important thing to keep in mind is, what is the drummer going to feel most comfortable playing? The more comfortable a drummer feels during a recording, the better the performance you’re going to get. You can actually trigger an acoustic kit with microphones, but you will not achieve the dynamics in the MIDI recording that you would with a MIDI kit such as the Roland V-Drums (see Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4. The widely popular Roland V-Drums.
Guitar players seem to like to accessorize more than any other type of musician. Because of this, there are a lot of different guitar interfaces available in today’s market. Most of them appear as a guitar-plug-to-USB adaptor and convert the guitar’s audio signal from analog to digital audio. If you have a pro sound card installed in your system, there is no need for a cheap guitar interface to plug your guitar into your computer. Using these convenient little devices could actually decrease your recording quality. I will go over this and much more in Chapter 6, “Recording Guitar and Bass.” What I’d like to discuss here is the option of recording MIDI with a guitar. Recording MIDI with a guitar has been done for years. Due to the complex nature of the guitar itself, the MIDI guitar has never been perfected. Like recording MIDI drums, there are definite plusses to recording MIDI with a guitar. For instance, let’s say you own a guitar, but you want to record a sitar or banjo part. Because a guitar is very similar to a banjo or sitar, using a sampler you can achieve some very realistic-sounding parts for instruments that fall into the guitar family. Also, if you’re a great guitar player and a horrible keyboard player, it may be easier for you to program other types of MIDI parts via your guitar as opposed to using a MIDI keyboard.
Again, another great quality of MIDI guitar is having the ability to quantize your playing or play something at a slower tempo so that you can speed it up later and sound like Yngwie Malmsteen or Eddie Van Halen. Most guitar-to-MIDI interfaces require a device that translates the string vibrations and audio pitch from the guitar to an actual MIDI note with certain characteristics. The audio-to-MIDI “translation” is very complex, and the results are far from perfect and usually require that the guitar player change the way he/she plays in order to achieve the desired results (which takes a lot out of a performance!). The only strictly MIDI guitar that I’m aware of today is made by a small company called Starr Labs, and it’s called the Z-tar (see Figure 2.5). It replaces each fret with a touch-sensitive button and comes highly recommend by guitar greats such as Stanley Jordan.
Figure 2.5. The all-MIDI Z-tar!
For those of you who do nothing but sit around, there is even a guy who designed a MIDI sofa controller (that’s right, a MIDIfied couch). If you want to explore more about MIDI, you can do so at http://www.midi.org
Note
When purchasing a MIDI controller (particularly a keyboard, guitar, or drum controller), it’s important to look for velocity-sensitive keys or pads. This enables you to record dynamics (soft or loud) in a performance. You should also look for a keyboard that has after-touch. Aftertouch allows you to alter the tonality of a pitch by applying physical pressure on a key once the key has been struck and held. This enables you to do slight pitch bends and other tricks (as you would do with a guitar string on the neck of a guitar).