Download the Free Demo!

MIDI files created with the Demo version of Touché will slowly fade away (velocity = zero) after approxiamately two to two and a half minutes of play (depending on tempo). Sorry about that, but I really need to motivate you to spend the small amount of money I'm asking for the regular, unlimited version of Touché.

The trouble with MIDI is that it is too good to sound human. Nobody, not even Van Cliburn, could strike all the keys on his piano at precisely the same moment with precisely the same amount of force. Our ears are tuned to hear all those minute variations and we are disappointed when they are not there. We say the music sounds "robotic", "machine like", "stiff", "stilted", etc.

Any dumb computer can play a Bach fugue. It will sound great because the composition was great. However, it will never sound incredible because it lacks soul, heart, and touch. I wrote Touché to fix that problem.

Imagine if Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix or B.B. King played "exactly" what was written instead of doing their thing. Yeecchh. The subtle magic we call interpretation, phrasing, or expression is simply the overall impact of all those "near misses" and slight imperfections of timing, volume, attack, and accent that give any musical performance that human touch.

Touché does not do anything that a good sequencer and hundreds of hours of labor couldn't accomplish. You could edit the event listing line by tedious line and get similar results, but if you want to try a slighty different interpretation of the music you have to do it all over again. Get one number wrong and you'll hear some awful howls from your speakers before you can hit the panic button.

Touché takes care of all that for you while giving you creative control with the sliders. You decide how much timing variation, velocity (volume, usually) variation, to use. You can even decide how heavily the down beats get accented from none at all to OOM pah pah.

Touché will even help musicians who just use MIDI to record their work. If you "quantize", even a little bit, to fix up some of those fumbling finger futzes you've lost that human touch in your music. Touché will put the "touch" back in your MIDI file and even gives you the capability to re-interpret a piece without re-recording it.

Whether you use Touché as a performance enhancer or as a final midi composition processor, you don't know how good your MIDI files really sound until they've been "Touchéd".

D²T