In a previous article on my website, I explained how to set up several MIDI instruments in a daisy chain that will allow you to play several electronic instruments at once from your MIDI keyboard. I then explained how you can use MIDI channels to allow each instrument in the chain to play different notes and sequences by setting them up to respond to and ignore messages on particular MIDI channels that you transmit from your MIDI keyboard. Setting things up this way allows …
The General Midi Standard For The Budding Electro-musician
One of the problems once faced by wanna-be MIDI musicians was that humans read musical notes differently than MIDI sound modules. To oversimplify, we use letters to represent each note (C sharp in the fourth octave, for example), and MIDI sound modules use numbers. Since most MIDI sound modules can play up to 128 notes, a MIDI sound module will number them from 0 to 127. The problems arose when different manufacturers started using different numbers to correspond with differ…
The History Of Midi Electronic Home Studio Recording
For electronic musicians, 1982 was the Year Zero that was the year that MIDI first came on the market. It was designed as freeware it was not patented, and was intended as a universal standard usable by any brand, so that MIDI could be used in a studio incorporating components or devices from many different manufacturers. The first of these was called MIDI 1.0, of course. Soon after that, musical instruments with MIDI jacks started appearing.
Sound Cards That Support Both Midi And Digital Audio
There is more than one reason why you might want a sound card that will support both MIDI files and digital audio files such as WAVE or MP3. Maybe you want to record your MIDI files in a format that can play on non-MIDI enabled equipment (you might get a wild hair and decide to email your romantic masterpiece to your girlfriend so she can play it on her computer or transfer it to CD). Or you might want to add lyrics to your MIDI composition (FYI, MIDI cannot create the sound …
Midi Interfaces
So youve heard about MIDI and are eager to set up your own MIDI home studio? Actually you can do that for a few hundred dollars assuming you already own a decent computer. Actually a home studio can cost a LOT more than that, but a few hundred dollars should take care of the basics for you. But be warned, if you catch MIDI fever as so many have, youre likely going to be spending a LOT more money, even to the point selling your refrigerator (or your kidney) to get money to…
Midi Sequencers: The Brain Of Your Home Recording Studio
A MIDI sequencer is a device that records a song that you play on a MIDI instrument (or series of instruments) and uses the recorded data to play these instruments the same way that you did when you recorded them. It is more than just a glorified tape recorder, though. What gets recorded is not the sounds themselves, but the commands that you gave the MIDI electronic instruments that told them to play this or that note in this or that sequence with a particular tone, volume, …
Modifying Your Midi Composition Using A Sequencer
Once you have recorded your musical composition onto a MIDI sequencer, what next? Well, you may have noticed some mistakes in your playing that you want to correct. Or you may want to change the composition to make it sound better. Or you may want to copy your composition into another file and gradually modify it until it becomes a whole new song and you have two compositions instead on just one. Whatever the reason, there are two ways that you can modify your original record…
Musical Instrument Digital Interface – The MIDI Trinity
Officially, MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and it was invented in 1982. These days, it refers to three components:
How Does A Music Synthesizer Work?
A music synthesizer makes sounds by using an electrical circuit as an oscillator to create and vary the frequency of sounds in order to produce different pitches. As long as the pitch is within the range of frequency that can be heard by a human ear, its known as a musical pitch (so a dog whistle wouldnt count) as a musical pitch. You can use a keyboard to vary these pitches at discrete intervals that correspond to the notes on the musical scale. If you put several oscill…
Some Things You Can Do With Midi (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology represents music in digital form. In this way you can create and fine-tune your composition one note at a time. You can also experiment with your composition in a way thats never been possible before, until you get it sounding they way you want it. Imagine Mozart directing a symphony orchestra: OK, all you violinists, put down your violins and pick up tubas. All you flutists, put down your flutes and pick up harmonicas….
Psychedelic Trance Music
Electronic music became popular as a result of advances in technology (particularly the development of Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI), and has since blossomed into a bewildering variety of genres including house, techno, trance, breakbeat, hardcore, and ambient. These genres, most of them quite danceable (ambient is a notable exception), can be further divided into sub-genres and spin-offs including trip-hop, garage, jungle, progressive house, etc. Now the sce…
How To Download Music From Your Brain (or The Next Best Thing!)
For many years I have occasionally experienced the following phenomenon: just when I would wake up in the morning, right at the state midway between dreaming and waking, I would gain lucidity but still be able to hear the tail end of my dream. A song would be playing, a very complex one, perfectly produced in every detail. And listening to it, I would be absolutely sure that I had never heard that song before. So where did it come from. After some thought I was left with th…