J. Anthony Allen shows two reasons MIDI beats recording audio: you can swap instruments or change sounds without re-recording, and you can speed up or slow down a performance without quality loss. Audio files glitch when stretched; MIDI doesn't.
Okay, so what are the big advantages of using midi? There are two. There are two reasons that MIDI is really powerful when making music. And here they are. The first is the option to change the sound. Think about it like this. If you record a guitar, what you've recorded is the sound of that guitar. You can add effects and things like that, but at the base of it, you have the recording of the instrument that you made and that is your main tone. With midi, we just have note on and off messages, right? So I've got this little chord progression here, And that's cool. But what if I want it to sound like, I don't know, something really weird? I can just change the instrument, Change it again. I can just keep changing it all day long. I don't have to re record anything. So that makes it really powerful. The other thing is tempo. I can adjust the tempo without any change in the audio quality. Now, I think we've already talked about warping and being able to stretch and shrink audio recordings. That works. But every time we do that, we degrade the audio at least a little bit. If you do any really extreme changes of tempo with an audio file and it's got a stretch way out, you're going to get glitches and things like that. With midi, you don't get those. If this was really short, let me just take it and do that and just nudge it all together. It's still just note on and note off messages. So this didn't change the quality of the audio. Same thing is if I take this whole thing and stretch it out to be super long. Well, that was a bad example. Let me just take one chord, stretch it out to be super long. It's still just turning on the note, turn off the note. So we didn't actually stretch the audio at all. And our audio quality is totally unaffected. So it is immune to being degraded by tempo changes. So that's why we really like working with MIDI when we're producing, because we can make stuff and then decide later if we want to change the sound, change the notes, which is another thing I haven't talked about yet, and change the tempo later.
