| Product: |
Audio and Music Software in general |
| Date: |
20.09.02 (373 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: cheap and fun
Disadvantages: none that I can think of
Getting bored with your PC? Wanna make some chunes? You know, - CHUNES! Like la la de da and stuff. You need a little PC studio set-up that's what you need mate.
Bet you've already got a soundcard on your PC haven't you? What you probably don't know is that your soundcard is almost certainly Midi compatible. Here's how you find out. Open search on your PC (don't know how to open search huh?). OK, right-click on start and choose search. In the 'search' box type *.mid and in the 'look-in:' box, click on the dropdown menu and choose 'Local Hard Drives'. Press Return and let it rip. Don't worry; all windows machines have some .mid files on them. Search will return a list. Pick one and Double-Click on it. The multimedia player should start and you should hear a sound, probably a piece of music, but it depends upon what exactly you chose. As long as you heard a sound then life is great and you have a midi capable sound card on your computer, which means that you can turn your PC into a little recording studio. Good huh? No? Not impressed? Just you wait, you will be.
In the extremely unlikely event that you don't have a '.mid' file on your PC then simply go and search for one on the web. There're millions of the bloody things out there!
The work that would eventually result in MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) began as a conversation between three audio engineers at a trade show in June 1981. I. Kakehashi (Roland Corporation), Tom Oberheim (Oberhiem Electronics) and Dave Smith (Sequential Circuits) were all concerned with the difficulty musicians faced in connecting synthesizers from the different manufacturers. What they wanted was a common 'language' which could be used to control any synthesizer, no matter who manufactured it.
Starting from the existing literature on computer networks, Smith worked up an initial proposal that he pres
ented to the Audio Engineers Society in November of that year, called the "Universal Synthesizer Interface" (USI). This was not MIDI but it was the catalyst, which brought the major Japanese and US manufacturers together. A year later in 1983 Midi 1.0 was released. It was an overnight success. All of the music manufacturers embraced it almost immediately.
Any instrument that supports Midi has a set of special inputs and outputs to receive and/or send Midi information. They are called Midi-In, Midi-Out and Midi-Thru. So what does midi actually consist of? Well, you can think of it as being a set of instructions to an instrument to play notes. The best analogy would be the old 'player pianos' which worked off a roll of punched paper or card. The holes in the card told the piano which note to play and for how long. Midi does essentially the same thing except it is implemented electronically. Furthermore, because modern synthesizers can mimic lots of different instruments, Midi not only tells the synth what note to play and for how long but also what instrument to play it as. Midi can also cater for various types of expression, for example, how hard the note is hit, whether the note will bend after being hit and many other subtle variations which real musicians playing real instruments are capable of. While midi can do a reasonable job of managing many of these expressions it can by no means handle them all. Furthermore, while modern 'Wavetable' synths can mimic many different instruments there are some whose sounds are so complex and subtle that the synth just doesn?t seem to be able to replicate it. So while Piano and string sounds, for example, will often be indistinguishable from the real thing, saxophones and, in particular, guitars, just sound cheesy!
So Midi was a way for synths to be remotely controlled. This meant that a single musician sitting at a Midi keyboard could control several instruments
at once. However, even with this there were fairly strict limits to the workload that the performer could handle at any one time. Somewhere along the line someone had the bright idea of recording the midi output onto tape or disk. This meant that you could replay the recording any time and the instrument would play the notes just as if the performer were still there. Of course if you wanted to record the parts for several different instruments then you would probably run into timing problems if you wanted to play them all back at the same time.
On the other hand, if you use a computer to record all of the parts and to play them back together so that they are always synchronized, you have what is known in the industry as a 'sequencer'. Sequencers can cost a lot of money. The most powerful products, like Cubase VST (which we use in our studio), cost over 500 dabs for the full-bifta versions.
However if you visit htttp://www.sonicspot.com/sequencers.html you will find loads that are FOC. Best to get one of these first to fool around with before you go shelling out serious dosh for a full-blown VST or similar. Even then, unless you are doing semi-pro or pro music production, then I wouldn't bother; there are much cheaper alternatives which are almost as good. We have VST, but only because she-who-must-be-obeyed is a choreographer and she uses it all the time for her work.
Almost all sequencers work the same way. The music will be arranged in 'bands', or strips, across the screen, each strip representing a different instrument. Each Midi song has room for up sixteen simultaneously playing instruments and each instrument occupies a track. Track 10 is a special track because it is always reserved for percussion, or drums. You can put what you like on the other tracks but it is customary to put piano on Track 1 and Bass on Track 2. Other than that, you can do what you want. So, how do you get the music in? Well basical
ly, four different ways:
You can simply 'open' any midi file and it will appear in the editor of your sequencer ready to be modified or played.
You can hook up a keyboard to you computer (on most conventional soundcards this is done using a ?Midi-to-games-port? lead which you can get from any computer shop for a few quid). Of course this pre-supposes that you have a midi-capable keyboard.
There are loads of 'soft' keyboard programs that will allow you to play notes through the conventional keyboard or using the mouse.
Most sequencer programs allow you to 'mark' and edit notes directly on the screen using the mouse. The more sophisticated ones will allow you to write conventional notes onto a staff, again using the mouse. Either way you can build your own tunes depending upon how musical you are.
Once you have your music in place you can fool around changing the instruments, changing the key and generally having fun. In addition, many sequencers will let you hook up a microphone to your sound card and record a vocal track or additional instruments alongside the midi. Your computer can become a very sophisticated Karaoke machine when you use it like this and every one can have fun pretending to be a Rock Star, or whatever.
There are literally millions of midi files on the web just waiting to be downloaded and messed about with. Some of 'em are absolute shite but lots of 'em are dead good. It's like having access to the biggest library of backing tracks in the World. Just go into Google and type 'midi files' and you will get a list of specialist midi search engines as long as your arm.
Even humble soundcards like SoundBlaster will support this kind of nonsense. Go on - give it a go, your Granny will love it at Christmas Time!
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