bvc

Thank you for the info. Does anyone else know of any keyboards that can for certain deliver all values? I'm especially interested in the Gem S2, but it is doubtful anyone reading this will have experience with this synth.

There have been arguments that MIDI as it stands is too low-resolution, but the consensus is that it's probably good enough. However, it may not even be the 128 steps we think, in terms of velocity. I recently decided to use my Studiologic SL-161 (with the respected Fatar TP/9S keybed) as my main controller over my Yamaha DX-11, as the DX can only hit a max velocity of 121, and that's if you're banging on it. I also noticed, via the MIDI meter at the bottom of Logic Pro 9, that there were a lot of holes in the values it was registering; for example, it could only send 100, 110, and 114, and nothing in between those. So, I tested my SL-161, and the results were surprisingly bad as well. In the upper registers, it was hitting only 114, 120, 124, and 127, and nothing in between. I then got out a Roland A-800 Pro MIDI controller (one of the better ones out there), and there were also a lot of missing values, and notably (regardless of which velocity curve was selected), the lowest velocity it was able to hit was 7. I know of certain patches that do interesting things in the 1-5 range, so this controller is unable to do them at all. [Yes, I am aware that velocity can be bumped and curved in software, but that's just spreading and redistributing the values your hardware is putting out, so it will only ever be sending out 85 (or what ever) out of 128 values, which is a pretty unsatisfactory solution.] Can anyone with good synths or master keyboards see if they are capable of hitting, say, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, and 127 (all of them), without any missing/unable to ever be registered? (The test was just hitting record, banging away at the same key for a good while, and reading the results of the individual note inputs in my DAW.) Thanks in advance, everybody!