One feature that might convince you to buy these plugs is that you can get a MIDI file out of them. It's important that you know what this MIDI support does and doesn't do, and I don't see anyone explaining it, so I will.
I had thought I could see the notes it plays. Maybe even use that MIDI file somewhere else. Maybe even learn a thing or two about how a guitar is played, and how articulations work in these plugins (and others), and on the guitar.
No, it won't do that.
The MID that you get out of these things is essentially code. It does not represent what you hear the plug playing. It represents code that the thing needs to play. Here's the distinction...
The MIDI data you see contains four types of info:
1. The notes YOU play.
You are not playing the guitar, you are only telling it what notes to constrain itself to. For example, in Silk you give it a chord and it plucks those strings in a pattern that it comes up with. Your chord notes are in what they call the "play range". You may, for example, play C-E-G for a full measure. This is the only part of the MIDI you can extract that makes any sense, and it is only the chord you played. It is not the plucked notes (the phrase) you hear.
Importantly, you cannot change the velocity (and therefore the dynamics) of what is played by changing the velocity of the "play range" notes. They are all 96 (if I recall) and changing them has no effect. In fact, you cannot even affect the overall dynamics by playing loudly or softly. It's entirely up to the pattern they programmed.
2. Keyswitches
You select one of 11 patterns by pressing one of 11 keys, and you select an articulation with a keyswitch. These are in the MIDI data you get. Note, though, that in Silk the one it gives you does not correspond to the one you played. I have no idea how that works. In Iron, though, it is the keyswitches you played.
3. The pattern notes
You bought this thing so it will play these patterns (phrases), and you'd think you'd get these phrases as MIDI notes. You do not. You get some data that you can kinda relate one-to-one with notes played, but there are keyswitches in nearby notes, and the note values of the phrase notes are not the notes played. They are instruction to the plugin. And no matter what notes are in your chord, these phrase notes will always be the same. The plugin takes your chord and these phrase notes and decides what to play, and the notes that are played are not here. This is code, not notes.
These notes do have velocity data, though, and their position in time does correspond to when they will play. But the note values do not represent what you will hear. I think they represent which of your chord notes will play. Possibly you could decode this.
So, you think you can take these notes and move them in time, or change their duration. You think you've figured out which ones you hear correspond to which ones you see, and you think you can change the phrase by moving the notes.
It will stop playing the notes you move in time.
There's some more decoding you could do if you think like a programmer. That's where the fourth type of data comes in. More in a second.
If you move notes vertically, you get unpredictable results. Remember, these notes do not tell you what's going to be played. They correspond to a string number in your chord, and if you move them vertically, you moved them off your string. Either they will stop playing, or instead of a note you will have a keyswitch.
Possibly you could change the pattern played by moving the note to a valid string number. I have not experimented enough to get predictable results.
4. Timing track
This was totally unexpected so I don't know what it's called, but it works like a timing belt. There is one note on c-1 (of I recall) for each note in the phrase you hear. The velocity of all of these is the same but the start time corresponds to one of the notes in the "code" section. If you move the timing note together with the code note, you can move the note you hear. You can also change the duration. But there are two MIDI events for each note you hear, and you have to move them together.
So, what is it good for?
You can use the MIDI data to get it to play something (a phrase at a time) that can be triggered in the plugin using a keyswitch. That is, you can copy-paste these 11 phrases (11 for each style, and there are about 30 styles per plug). There are also a collection of phrases that are common to all styles, and you can copy those. You also get the last chord that you played. You could conceivably build a song this way, a phrase at a time.
You can, at least, re-build what you are playing, to get it to play again. I did not find a recording function, so as far as I know you cannot grab your whole song this way. You can only grab a phrase at a time, including the last chord you played. I did not try it, but I'm assuming you could record your chords and keychanges and reproduce a performance that way, but if you were hoping to get the phrases it was playing, you have to poke at it a phrase at a time, and the data is mostly unintelligible.
And you can't take it to another instrument and you can't really examine it. It's for playing back in this plugin only.
If there is interest I'll screencap what these code sequences look like and maybe transcribe what I hear, which is what you thought you were going to get out of the MIDI drag-n-drop feature, so you can compare the two.
What do I think of these plugins?
I didn't spend a lot of time with Silk. The patterns just seemed...indistinct. I don't know how to play guitar, and this might be a way I could build a song with a realistic plucking pattern. And it sounded really nice. But the phrases were just...indistinct. I was not making beautiful music. I was making a wall of pleasant notes.
Playing from a copied MIDI file, I noticed that Silk sometimes omits notes in the pattern. I don't know if it's intentional. It'll skip the same note every time it loops, so it seems intentional, but it didn't skip the note the other three times it played it, and it sounds...off. Like it's a bug.
I've spent a lot of time with Iron and will continue to play with it. It's a lot of fun. The phrases aren't awesome. You're supposed to piece them together to make a song. Individually, most of them aren't very interesting. Some of them are. Buried in there are some pretty easy ways to get rock and punk hooks.
I do not play guitar and still do not really see a value in some of the articulations, and there are a lot of important one missing. The playing style is represented in the phrases, and you don't have a lot of control over those.
But the plug sounds pretty cool and is a lot of fun to play.
There are 11 phrases unique to each of the 30-ish styles in each plugin, plus some phrases that are common to all styles. There isn't a keyswitch to change styles live. It's pretty limited. Maybe you could connect a controller to the style switcher, but it seems intended that you'd play live with one style at a time.
Possibly this is your rhythm instrument and not your lead. I don't know. I don't play guitar and I'm not yet good at playing these plugins.
Important playing tip
I haven't seen any of the walkthroughs mention this. If you play legato, you can change the notes that are played without interrupting the 2-bar patterns, but if you play staccato, it will stop playing the pattern in the middle of it and move on to the next one. You get a visual representation of your place in the pattern, but it is pretty small on screen. You'll have to count it. Letting it play the patterns to completion is important to getting predictable and useful results, though if your timing is good you could combine pieces. You need a break in the music to make that happen, though.
For example, if I start a phrase on A (playing a power chord, root and fifth), and while still holding it I momentarily press A#, I get a delightful, creepy 2nd interval (replacing the power chord) for part of the phrase. I can simply let up on the A# to go back to the power chord I was playing, or I can lift both and play a partial new phrase (or repeat the beginning of the same one I was playing). In Iron, fourths usually sound pretty good, and major thirds sometimes sound pretty good. Other intervals, not so much. In Silk you'll be playing chords normally, in Iron you'll be playing mostly power chords, and sometimes thirds and fourths.
I had thought I could see the notes it plays. Maybe even use that MIDI file somewhere else. Maybe even learn a thing or two about how a guitar is played, and how articulations work in these plugins (and others), and on the guitar.
No, it won't do that.
The MID that you get out of these things is essentially code. It does not represent what you hear the plug playing. It represents code that the thing needs to play. Here's the distinction...
The MIDI data you see contains four types of info:
1. The notes YOU play.
You are not playing the guitar, you are only telling it what notes to constrain itself to. For example, in Silk you give it a chord and it plucks those strings in a pattern that it comes up with. Your chord notes are in what they call the "play range". You may, for example, play C-E-G for a full measure. This is the only part of the MIDI you can extract that makes any sense, and it is only the chord you played. It is not the plucked notes (the phrase) you hear.
Importantly, you cannot change the velocity (and therefore the dynamics) of what is played by changing the velocity of the "play range" notes. They are all 96 (if I recall) and changing them has no effect. In fact, you cannot even affect the overall dynamics by playing loudly or softly. It's entirely up to the pattern they programmed.
2. Keyswitches
You select one of 11 patterns by pressing one of 11 keys, and you select an articulation with a keyswitch. These are in the MIDI data you get. Note, though, that in Silk the one it gives you does not correspond to the one you played. I have no idea how that works. In Iron, though, it is the keyswitches you played.
3. The pattern notes
You bought this thing so it will play these patterns (phrases), and you'd think you'd get these phrases as MIDI notes. You do not. You get some data that you can kinda relate one-to-one with notes played, but there are keyswitches in nearby notes, and the note values of the phrase notes are not the notes played. They are instruction to the plugin. And no matter what notes are in your chord, these phrase notes will always be the same. The plugin takes your chord and these phrase notes and decides what to play, and the notes that are played are not here. This is code, not notes.
These notes do have velocity data, though, and their position in time does correspond to when they will play. But the note values do not represent what you will hear. I think they represent which of your chord notes will play. Possibly you could decode this.
So, you think you can take these notes and move them in time, or change their duration. You think you've figured out which ones you hear correspond to which ones you see, and you think you can change the phrase by moving the notes.
It will stop playing the notes you move in time.
There's some more decoding you could do if you think like a programmer. That's where the fourth type of data comes in. More in a second.
If you move notes vertically, you get unpredictable results. Remember, these notes do not tell you what's going to be played. They correspond to a string number in your chord, and if you move them vertically, you moved them off your string. Either they will stop playing, or instead of a note you will have a keyswitch.
Possibly you could change the pattern played by moving the note to a valid string number. I have not experimented enough to get predictable results.
4. Timing track
This was totally unexpected so I don't know what it's called, but it works like a timing belt. There is one note on c-1 (of I recall) for each note in the phrase you hear. The velocity of all of these is the same but the start time corresponds to one of the notes in the "code" section. If you move the timing note together with the code note, you can move the note you hear. You can also change the duration. But there are two MIDI events for each note you hear, and you have to move them together.
So, what is it good for?
You can use the MIDI data to get it to play something (a phrase at a time) that can be triggered in the plugin using a keyswitch. That is, you can copy-paste these 11 phrases (11 for each style, and there are about 30 styles per plug). There are also a collection of phrases that are common to all styles, and you can copy those. You also get the last chord that you played. You could conceivably build a song this way, a phrase at a time.
You can, at least, re-build what you are playing, to get it to play again. I did not find a recording function, so as far as I know you cannot grab your whole song this way. You can only grab a phrase at a time, including the last chord you played. I did not try it, but I'm assuming you could record your chords and keychanges and reproduce a performance that way, but if you were hoping to get the phrases it was playing, you have to poke at it a phrase at a time, and the data is mostly unintelligible.
And you can't take it to another instrument and you can't really examine it. It's for playing back in this plugin only.
If there is interest I'll screencap what these code sequences look like and maybe transcribe what I hear, which is what you thought you were going to get out of the MIDI drag-n-drop feature, so you can compare the two.
What do I think of these plugins?
I didn't spend a lot of time with Silk. The patterns just seemed...indistinct. I don't know how to play guitar, and this might be a way I could build a song with a realistic plucking pattern. And it sounded really nice. But the phrases were just...indistinct. I was not making beautiful music. I was making a wall of pleasant notes.
Playing from a copied MIDI file, I noticed that Silk sometimes omits notes in the pattern. I don't know if it's intentional. It'll skip the same note every time it loops, so it seems intentional, but it didn't skip the note the other three times it played it, and it sounds...off. Like it's a bug.
I've spent a lot of time with Iron and will continue to play with it. It's a lot of fun. The phrases aren't awesome. You're supposed to piece them together to make a song. Individually, most of them aren't very interesting. Some of them are. Buried in there are some pretty easy ways to get rock and punk hooks.
I do not play guitar and still do not really see a value in some of the articulations, and there are a lot of important one missing. The playing style is represented in the phrases, and you don't have a lot of control over those.
But the plug sounds pretty cool and is a lot of fun to play.
There are 11 phrases unique to each of the 30-ish styles in each plugin, plus some phrases that are common to all styles. There isn't a keyswitch to change styles live. It's pretty limited. Maybe you could connect a controller to the style switcher, but it seems intended that you'd play live with one style at a time.
Possibly this is your rhythm instrument and not your lead. I don't know. I don't play guitar and I'm not yet good at playing these plugins.
Important playing tip
I haven't seen any of the walkthroughs mention this. If you play legato, you can change the notes that are played without interrupting the 2-bar patterns, but if you play staccato, it will stop playing the pattern in the middle of it and move on to the next one. You get a visual representation of your place in the pattern, but it is pretty small on screen. You'll have to count it. Letting it play the patterns to completion is important to getting predictable and useful results, though if your timing is good you could combine pieces. You need a break in the music to make that happen, though.
For example, if I start a phrase on A (playing a power chord, root and fifth), and while still holding it I momentarily press A#, I get a delightful, creepy 2nd interval (replacing the power chord) for part of the phrase. I can simply let up on the A# to go back to the power chord I was playing, or I can lift both and play a partial new phrase (or repeat the beginning of the same one I was playing). In Iron, fourths usually sound pretty good, and major thirds sometimes sound pretty good. Other intervals, not so much. In Silk you'll be playing chords normally, in Iron you'll be playing mostly power chords, and sometimes thirds and fourths.
Statistics: Posted by Liz Gupton — Mon Oct 07, 2024 5:59 pm — Replies 2 — Views 99