Why would anybody not like MIDI?

What Venetian Snares is referring to is probably the way pitch is handled: You have a base pitch that is equivalent to a note and a pitch bend message that has a rather low resolution and is interpreted on the side of the synth. This is all fine if you want to play your synthesizer like a piano and maybe bend a note once in a while. But imagine trying to play your synth like a guitar or violin, with the ability to freely slide between notes. This can only be approximated on the synths side by gliding from the starting note to the end note. However, that will limit the possible expression a lot, simply because you can't specify the speed of the slide very well. Mappings can be made (e.g. velocity or mod wheel), but they won't ever come close to the expressiveness and intuitivity of sliding along a string instrument. Also, things like vibrato are impossible to really play. Again, you can map the vibrato amount to your modwheel or something, but that's hardly the same as what a guitar player can do. Basically, if you're just thinking in terms of a keyboard, you won't miss a lot. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot to miss. Using control voltages instead enables full continuous control over pitch, i.e. you can play any pitch that your control interface is capable of sending and move freely between any two pitches. There are some devices and some software nowadays that cleverly do this with MIDI as well (e.g. the Linnstrument and Madrona Labs Soundplane), but both are nicer to use with control voltages, as some synths aren't as good at correctly interpreting the midi that they send correctly.

Another thing the basic MIDI protocol is pretty terrible at is sync, in particular when used with devices connected to a computer via USB. You get a lot of jitter in the clock. Synching with control voltages will (assuming that the device generating the clock is doing it steadily enough and is generating a clock at a high enough ppq) gives much better results.

Routing can get nightmarish if you have a lot of devices. However, that's somewhat to be expected when trying to interconnect a bunch of devices with any protocol. I'm sure connecting 10+ synths with control voltages would be just as terrible, if not more so.

/r/synthesizers Thread