Midi sequencing basics and programming pdf

Whether your goal is to play in a band, o. The speed of the transport determines how much MIDI data can be carried, and how quickly it will be received. MIDI is a music description language in digital binary form. The files contain all the MIDI instructions for notes, volumes, sounds, and even effects.

Audio and Non Linear Educating Ask. Virtual instruments that are driven by MIDI data produce sounds in real time, in sync with the rest of your tracks. This month, he explains the concept of MIDI sequencing.

To anyone used to playing and recording using traditional methods and skills, the MIDI sequencer is sometimes viewed as little short of cheat. About the author. As such, here is another table that explains these controler numbers and what they are used for. This table shows some standardized controller numbers.

Controller numbers 0 - 31 are continuous, MSB most significant byte , numbers 32 - 63 are continuous, LSB least significant byte , and 64 - 97 are switches. So far, in all these tables, the events and commands had to be directed to a specific MIDI channel. These are known as System Messages.

So then, here's a table to list these System Messages. Finally, there are messages that like system messages do not apply to specific MIDI channels and basically affect the playing of the song in general.

Here's a table with these messages, remember there is no data to supply to these commands. With all this information, you should now be better equipped to understand the contents of a MIDI file. There is, however, a very differrent type of information that can reside in a MIDI file. This type of information does not affect the song itself but rather affects the hardware sound card, keyboard, sound modules, drum machines and the likes that the song will be played on.

These are known as System Exclusive Messsage and this is what we'll be seeing right now. As I mentionned above, Different music gear manufacturers incorporate their own features into their equipment. The way they allow their equipment to be controlled is with the use of a special set of messages that are known as system exclusive messages. The wide spread term for these messages are SysEx.

There is no specific structure for a SysEx message per se except that it has a beginning and an end. Here is the structure of the beginning of the SysEx message:. It will help to compare this against the MIDI gear to see if anything can actually process the message. It can be a whole bunch of different things too that would be needed to set the keyboard into the right configuration to play the song for example.

Could be asking the keyboard to dump it's current SysEx setup so that it can be used later as another example. SysEx, in itself, becomes more than useful quite quickly when you really want to control, at the finest detail, the performance of a song on a given MIDI gear. This means that they do not apply to any specific manufacturer. Here are these Universal SysEx messages. Well I think I've packed enough information for a first part of a series.

After you've digested this information there's no doubt in my mind that you'll know alot more about MIDI files than you do now. This is really only the beginning.

After you read this once, you should just consider this as a reference to what lies ahead in the series. There's no need to remember every single piece of information unless you really want to as you can just refer to this page whenever you like. There was alot of ground to cover and I think we did just that. In the next part of the series, we'll start putting all this information to good use by creating a program that can read a MIDI file, parse it's contents and put them in a structure we'll define in order to view them and manipulate them as we see fit.

So brace yourself, there's plenty of coding up ahead in your future. When you play a series of notes on one of these instruments it will send MIDI data for the note played a number between 0 and and a series of other numbers for velocity, pitch bend etc. If you are using traditional MIDI 5 pin cables you are unlikely to have a MIDI in port in your computer, therefore you must use some sort of interface.

Or more common and what I would recommend is to connect to a general audio interface such as this one which has inpits for MIDI but also other types of instruments, microphones etc. If your MIDI keyboard or other device is more modern, it is likely to just use a USB connection and this can be plugged straight into the computer without the need for an interface. But your computer has now just received a series of numbers, this alone will not produce a sound.

To do this you must have some sort of virtual instrument within your DAW to which these numbers will be applied and a sound will be produced. Or in many, such as Ableton Live, a huge library of instruments comes pre-loaded into the software. A MIDI signal can also be sent to other machines which can interpret these signals and subsequently produce a sound.

This could be a synthesizer module or a sound module which comes loaded with sounds. So, for example, say you wanted the level of the track to change during the chorus to make it stand out, or even if you want to change elements of the EQ mid-song. This is done in many pieces of DAW software by simply making these changes yourself in real time as the track is recording. This will all be recorded alongside the MIDI track and you will have this automation built into your song.

As with other elements of MIDI you can of course manually add automation after the recording is made or tweak certain elements. MIDI instruments will often have different modes. This involves turning something known as Omni on or off and then changing between polyphony and monophony. In this mode, the instrument responds to all MIDI messages it receives. It will then attempt to play all the parts of all instruments attached to MIDI controller.

These notes can be played simultaneously as it is set to polyphony. In this mode, the instrument receives data from all channels but can only play monophonically. Receives data on one channel and can only play monophonically. MIDI is very popular in music production, in particular in the home recording studio. This is due to several advantages, but there are also some disadvantages you should be aware of too.

This is because they are stored as a series of simple numbers rather than a complex audio file MP3 or WAV. This may not be an issue for your storage space if you have a computer or laptop with ample memory. But with smaller files, you cut down the amount of work your system has to do too and when you have complex tracks this will make everything run much smoother.

If you want to send files to one another, it will be much quicker using MIDI as opposed to sending lots of huge audio files. Bear in mind though they must have the same virtual instrument in their DAW software to be able to hear what you can. Do you want the piano to build in volume throughout the chord progression?

No problem, just alter the velocity values. Did you accidentally hit a G instead of a G on the very last note of a 5-minute synth piece?

No problem, just change the note in the piano roll. If you record in pure audio you can change these things using transposing or volume alteration, but it is not as easy or quick to do and you will never have quite as much accuracy in altering very specific elements as you do with MIDI.

Possibly the most important advantage for us home musicians is to open up a world of musical opportunities on a budget. Not many of us can get together a string quartet or even a full live drum kit. By using MIDI, we can take virtual instruments and create complete tracks on a budget. There is now nothing stopping you recording an entire symphony using a full orchestra of sounds, without leaving your bedroom.

Often we think of a keyboard when we think of a MIDI instrument but it could be pretty much anything. Many electronic drum kits, for example, send messages via MIDI.