What Am I Capable Of?

When I was growing up in the 80s, a group of companies got together and formed a standard called Musical Instrument Digital Interface. (MIDI)

As the technology matured in the first 5 years, one of those companies built a sound module that had the ability to produce fairly comprehensive arrangements.

Roland Corporation had been building legendary synthesizers for years, long before MIDI existed, but this box would open up new possibilities for songwriting, composition, gaming, and film scoring. It created a standard for sound modules moving forward.

While visiting the Medicine Hat Home and Trade Show in 1987, I stopped by the local music store's booth to see what was new.

The store owner had let me know that they had just received this new sound module, and I was welcome to play with it.

Using a keyboard and a sequencer, I was able to record different tracks with different MIDI channels which were assigned to whatever sounds I wanted. This was incredibly cool!!

As I layered more and more tracks, I was noticing that some of the notes were "going missing" during playback.

I asked the owner, "How come some of the notes aren't playing?

His response: "It can only play 32 notes at one time."

My initial thought was "That sucks."

Mind you, back then, this was a HUGE achievement. A box that had 128 different patches, 8 melodic parts and one rhythm part was something no one had done before.

It was revolutionary.

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Fast forward to 2005:

A software company called Synthogy released a plugin called Ivory. This plugin had SO MANY levels of velocity, that the entire piano library could exceed many gigabytes of RAM.

Remember that 32 note polyphony limitation the MT32 suffered from?

If you installed the Ivory software onto a high speed SSD (solid state drive), it was capable of...

1000 NOTES OF POLYPHONY.

Yes, you read that right. 1000 notes.

That means, that if you had 10 pianos and got a bunch of people together to play EVERY NOTE SIMULTANEOUSLY on all 10 pianos, (88X10= 880!!) the computer would simply twiddle its thumbs and ask "What else can I do for you?"

That's really difficult to comprehend.

So, back to the initial title, "What Am I Capable Of?" Why the technical musical geekery?

Curiosity.

When I first played the MT32, I was having a riot composing on the spot until notes went missing. I have to imagine the Roland engineers saying "We can only support this amount of tracks and polyphony with the budget and the equipment we're working with."

Later on, we saw polyphony grow from 32 to 64 to 128 and even higher.

Innovative artists ask questions like "What would it be like to have blended colors? How can we make this sound better? What haven't we done previously?"

Another way of phrasing this is: "What are we capable of?"

My coaching experience at Novus Global taught me that it is more interesting to explore than to think you're the best at something.

I'll end this article with a couple of questions:

What would thrill you?

What are you capable of?

I invite you to embrace curiosity and enjoy finding out. That's when the magic happens.

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You can purchase the new book by Novus Global: Beyond High Performance at this link:

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-High-Performance-Coaches-Better/dp/1637554966/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1695401979&refinements=p_27%3AJason+Jaggard&s=books&sr=1-1

Here is a list of computer games that made use of the MT-32:

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_MT-32-compatible_computer_games

Synthogy Ivory Information:

https://synthogy.com/index.php/products/software-products/ivory-2-grand-pianos