The Basics of MIDI: Overview & Applications (Part 2 of 10)

you know Craig I understand drum machines but I don't quite understand MIDI and how to interface everything together I've got some friends that can do wonders with MIDI but to me it's it's a bit overwhelming and I feel kind of stupid well I wouldn't feel too bad about it if I were you because MIDI has such wide applications in so many fields I mean it's not just it's not just for keyboard players it's also for a composition it's for education you can use it in the studio to automate your mixing audio for video it has applications their guitars are just starting to get into MIDI as a live performance thing with standard guitars as well as MIDI guitars drummers are into MIDI so there are always new people getting involved with it so it's it's getting to the point now where if you want to do anything musically at all it really does help to know about MIDI so it's good - it really is good to investigate all this stuff it's not nearly as intimidating as you might think it is I hope not first of all well I'll tell you what rather than get into bits and bytes and and buzzwords and all that kind of stuff let's look at me from a problem-solving standpoint how to do specific things that MIDI allows for when you interface various pieces of equipment together okay so I promise no no status bytes none of that stuff great I mean you don't have you don't have to know how over dam works to plug in an appliance right exactly so this is like a nice simple way of dealing with it probably we should begin with how why MIDI got started okay because MIDI just didn't come out of nowhere MIDI was designed to solve specific problems so we need a little bit of electronic music history here going back into the dark ages of the late 70s and early 80s there were several problems associated with the technology at that time one is that it was expensive and so manufacturers because synthesizers weren't that common would tend to make synthesizers that were complete units a keyboard you know the case the power supply that the sound generators all that stuff which ended up being fairly expensive now if you wanted to trade in your old model for a new model you'd have to essentially get rid of the entire system and start all over from scratch with a new keyboard it wasn't anything you could use from your old system so that was a pretty expensive process sure is the other thing was if you because electronic music equipment had started off as a serve a minority thing in the sense that it wasn't very common it was kind of expensive it was limited to universities and a few other like very specialized applications it wasn't a very commonplace type thing so he had all these different manufacturers going in somewhat different directions and they would be working on something and not know what another manufacturers working on so they would all design their own consistent standards on how to hook gear together but it didn't mean that you could hook gear from other manufacturers together what made this a real big problem was that musicians discovered early on that analog synthesizers at that time tended to sound a little thin by themselves so what they liked to do was layer sound multiple sounds together like a brass sound on a violin sound at the same time to get an orchestral effect and a lot of times what they would have to do is have two physical separate keyboards sitting there playing one with the left hand one with the right hand playing unison lines to get the same sound that's really pretty inefficient and pretty expensive it also meant that if you wanted to have six different sounding keyboards you have six different keyboards onstage so I mean it was a roadies nightmare if nothing else so anyway these companies did come up with ways to interface their own synthesizers so you could take two mogh keyboards for example and hook them together and be able to play one keyboard and have it trigger sounds from the second keyboard okay okay so but it was a non-standard protocol if you went out and let's suppose you like the sound of a mug since but you also like the sound of an R since so you went you tried to hook him together they wouldn't didn't work it and work you have to make some little adapter box and get some tech to sit there with a soldering iron and this is not exactly the stuff of which mass-market dreams are made right so that was one problem there was the the obsolescence factor which was just as strong back then as it is now but the difference is now you know you can get a drum machine for what four hundred bucks or something like that in the synthesizer for under a thousand so if you wanted to add another synthesizer now it's not quite as big a deal as like spending another five grand right okay so musicians were kind of reluctant to to turn over their technology and essentially get rid of an entire old system and replace it with an entire new system so that was that was that was pretty inconvenient alternative controllers were very difficult to do in other words it was simple to hook a keyboard up to these synthesizers but if you wanted to play guitar or drum controllers or whatever they usually had to be custom-made to work with a specific company synthesizer now a controller is is something that controls another device like a keyboard with control yeah actually controller is one of those wonderful words that has many meanings depending upon the context we will be looking at two basic meanings one is a controller is a device that you perform on like a guitar controller or a keyboard controller or a drum controller but there's also another type of controller which is a physical knob or slider or something like that that controls an aspect of the sound a foot pedal those are also called controllers it'll be pretty obvious when we're talking about it what the differences between the two are okay you'll see as we go along but yeah that's that that is a point that confuses people sometimes yeah so so yes alternate controls were problems synchronization was a complete disaster because all these companies had different standards and so like you'd hook up a drum machine to a sequencer and it would be going halftime or a double-time or if you could get it to start at all or they wouldn't maintain synchronization after they'd started and this was producing sort of chaos in the music business okay so oh yeah and it was hurting manufacturers too because it was a very unsettled market and people were very dissatisfied well I get this thing and I get this other thing and they don't work and then they you know they go to repair people and it did yeah so big mess big mess big mess so amazingly enough a bunch of manufacturers got together and originally there was a standard called the universal synthesizer interface and this was developed by the folks at sequential and it was presented at an Audio Engineering Society convention as a way to separate the controller from the sound generating circuitry and the rationale for this was that if you wanted to buy a new synthesizer you could keep your keyboard and just get a new sound generating device and there'd be a standard way of getting note data from the keyboard to the sound generator and so if you had a you know a keyboard that's made by company a and a sound generated from Company B and then he decided to buy a third generator from Company C they could all be hooked together and work just fine so this solves several of the problems one is all the redundant keyboards on stage he only needed one keyboard it cut the cost way down because obviously a little rack mounting unit is going to be a lot simpler to manufacture than something with a big case keyboard in all those mechanical parts and all that and it also helped prevent some of the obsolescence factor because now you could just just get the parts you needed to improve your rig and your sound you didn't have to go for these other things and they also decided to come up with a signal process you know with signal processors that can be controlled in the same way which we'll be getting into later okay anyway this spec was basically looked at by several companies and quite a few you know Japanese and American companies contributed their ideas to this initial spec and that grew into MIDI and I should add that it's a sort of an amazing political statement about the music industry that all these competing engineers from all these different companies we're willing to get together for something that would actually do some good I mean if you look what happened with 8-track vs. cassette and beta versus VHS and all these different I mean try to take a disc from one computer and put it into another computer and I mean it's just really there's so little standardization in the world that we as musicians have real been fortunate that this whole meeting like oh yeah that it came about and not only that but the specification continues to be refined to this day there are new additions being made to it and this is all being done as a concerted effort with unanimous agreement by all the manufacturers who are part of the organization that takes care of the MIDI spec so what this ensures is that they try to make sure that any future developments are backward compatible with what happened in the past and you can still use you know a 1983 keyboard in a 1991 MIDI setup which is you know really pretty remarkable about it especially you know contrasted to computers or something like that right so what is it what does MIDI stand for well MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface okay but you don't need to know that I don't know okay no MIDI you can just think of MIDI well let's tell you what let's tell you what MIDI is okay great MIDI is a language a computer bay a computer language that expresses musical concepts musical performance data the status of a musical instrument in numeric terms in other words everything that you do is translate it into numbers okay now a lot of people at this point wonder well what does numbers have to do with an artistic experience I mean we're talking about feeling and grooves and you're talking about the square root of pi or something right right yeah but if you think about it a second everything you do musically really does relate to numbers like when you tune you tune to a 440 where 440 is a number of cycles per second right cycles per second another mathematical concept what's your tempo 120 beats per minute right there's another fraction you're dealing with what notes are you playing eighth notes sixteenth notes okay what what about vibrato well that's like you know seven Hertz to 10 Hertz frequency see all these things you are dealing with numeric concepts even even when you're talking about something like noise you're talking about a signal-to-noise ratio of so many DB right so as it turns out music and mathematics have been getting along famously for centuries I mean you know since Pythagoras and probably before that we just don't have records of it right and so it's it's not at all illogical that you would be able to express all the performance parameters of playing music as a number to it and then capture it some way well capture it analyze it change it mess around with it let's see this brings up a very important point inside of almost all contemporary keyboards drum machine signal processors and all that you have a computer and what computers do is they crunch numbers they can't think very well you know but they can sure crunch numbers real fast so since there's all this computer power in there and since we're expressing music as a mathematical thing they just go together like hand and glove but again you don't have to concern yourself with what those numbers are or how the process occurs or anything like that all you have to know is that on the average MIDI instrument you'll have a MIDI in and a MIDI out and optionally a MIDI through okay they probably the most where should we should start is it the MIDI out okay let's take a look at this keyboard here this is um in fact as proof that you can get MIDI to work with different manufacturers stuff we have a liberal assortment of alesis gear we have a drum cat we have an in sonic EPS we're gonna be having a MIDI guitar later from yet another company and they all work together just fine because they all have the MIDI connections right now those MIDI connections you have you're already familiar with what the audio connection on a musical instrument is uh-huh in other words let's say you have an electric guitar you play a note it sends out note data over the audio except it's not expressed as numbers it's expressed as a waveform the ending see on an oscilloscope and here and every way and all that okay so that's what's coming out of a guitar now you also have a power chord and that's basically power in in your keyboard right there's power coming out of the wall and it's feeding the Doosan so you got power you got audio made he's just another cable but it doesn't carry audio it doesn't carry power it carries musical information as a stream of numbers this constant stream of numbers it's so let's take a look at some of the some of the midi language that you would have appearing over this cable when you play the keyboard well let's let's play a note here there's a middle C okay okay as soon as I press that key a piece of data goes out the midi out that says AC has been played and this is the note now MIDI numbers each note and middle C just happens to be a note number of 60 okay now of course that may show up on different places on different keyboards if you transpose it in octave you know if you transpose this whole keyboard down an octave and up an octave the nodal show up in a different place but middle C is always 60 and then it goes down an octave from there the next the next C down would be 48 36 and so on so when I press that C as far as you know you've played a C as far as the computer is concerned note number 60 has been turned on okay when you release the key it sends out another piece of data that says this key has been released now think about what's happening if you have if this is a master keyboard and you have a little sound generator offstage with a MIDI in now that MIDI in is constantly reading what's coming in on that line so if it sees a message that says the C has been pressed it will play a C just as surely as if you press the keyboard key because it's getting that data that says turn the season and when they release the key it turns to C off now while we had that we have a particular program loaded into the sampler here also called a patch though sometimes called a patch and why why is it called a patch though okay here's another here's another thing of confusing terminology that's changed over time it used to be with old synthesizers that they were strictly modular devices because they were so expensive you'd buy like an oscillator and he'd buy another oscillator and they'd even buy a filter and then a little mixer to mix them all together and because they were so Undead ik ated to a specific function you'd have to hook these things together with patch cords like it's like an old telephone exchange right so after a while they were just called patches you know what country I'm patching why I was there now these days your patches are done in the computer you're saying send this module to this module and you don't even it's a completely transparent process you don't even have to think about it so more and more people are calling what used to be called patches programs okay and what a program consists of is a whole string of individual parameters set a particular way for example if one sound one parameter might be the brightness of the sound or the pitch of the sound or the tuning offset you know these are all different parameters and by setting the way you want you can come up with a program okay attached and in most synthesizers these days you can store that program in memory so you can just hit a couple buttons and get all the all the work that you've put into changing those parameters back in a second instead of having to switch patch cords and turn knobs and write and all that stuff much easier okay so you have your program selected on the other synth you know the MIDI out goes to the MIDI in you play the note it sends a note the other thing responds cool so far right very simple but there's much more to it than notes now the program I have in here is a sample of Maurice white from Earth Wind and Fire doing vocal sounds okay and there's a couple different programs in here but let me show you some of the other aspects of the midi language in addition to turning a note on or off part of the data that also goes with that note is the velocity with which you strike the key and this usually correlates to dynamics now this confuses some people it's like what does velocity I don't see this thing moving right yeah but it is moving because you're going from the key up to a key down and so what velocity measures is the time it takes to go from the key up to the key down so if it takes a long time it assumes that it's a it's a low velocity value okay and so the dynamics are low whereas if you hit it real hard it goes down fast so I'd be a high velocity value and translate into higher dynamics one of the beauties of MIDI is that you don't have to always have velocity control dynamics it could control filter brightness it could control d2 it could control anything that you want to assign it to traditionally it's used to control dynamics but that doesn't mean you have to do it now here's another another thing you can do there's a this this keyboard has a pressure response which means once the key is down you can press on it and produce more data and in this particular in this particular program what it does is it changes the amount of vibrato okay see how I'm pressing it and we're right I was coming out hard you press it right and that's part of the that's so the velocity and the pressure and all that you can vary and the note of course just by playing specific keys on the keyboard now furthermore there are other performance things that you might want to use live like well consider a foot pedal for example a lot of times the foot pedal is good for fade and fade outs and stuff like that so in this particular case I it's programmed to act as a volume control so you can do swells and fades and stuff like that okay meanwhile it's sending pedal data through the MIDI out port so if another unit can respond to the pedal it can be turned on and off along with this one each of these things you're doing is four represented by a number right just like mill C was right the difference is that let's talk a little bit about what a MIDI event is when you press the key down that's one event when you release it that's another event okay with something like a foot pedal as you sweep it through all the possible states it's going through a lot of different events it's going from full off to full-on so typically sweeping a pedal or something like that it's going to generate more MIDI data than just playing notes okay so that's so that's a little bit of a subtlety there but in any event there's a lot of stuff you can send down the MIDI line at one time it goes at a very fast rate in addition there are these performance controls like like pitch pitch Bend and mod wheel that's real common on most synthesizers what the pitch wheel does is it lets you actually vary the pitch of a note which is good for lead guitar sounds and bending up to pitch on a wind instrument or special effects like that and again this is all getting sent through the MIDI out modulation wheel this is another on this particular program it's another way to add in vibrato okay now remember I mentioned programs before mm-hmm this this particular keyboard here the the EPS has what's called patch select buttons they let that lets you select any one of four different programs sort of instantly without having to key them in so like here we have an O sound this patch is an ah sound sound so that's how you send out different programs and again that data is going out the MIDI out so you're starting to see how this keyboard the keyboard itself is not making any sounds remember and right and midis not making any sounds the keyboard is simply generating numeric data the cart that mimics your playing and it sends it of course in the internal sound generators in here but then it also sends it into the MIDI out port so the cause of the you have the MIDI information going out the MIDI out and then the audio information going out the audio out right so you can hear what you're playing as well as send the information out to another device hmm exactly okay and you know it's it's real handy that way the MIDI in this is pretty obvious from what we've been talking about the MIDI and receives that data and and responds to it the MIDI through it all that does is it carries a duplicate of what's at the MIDI in and we'll see why when in in multiple systems where you have numerous pieces of equipment hooked together that becomes important because you want to be able to send that data to several pieces of gear so we'll be getting into hookups okay in the next part but that's that's the third connection it's consider cording to the MIDI specification it's an optional it's an optional terminal though it's not every piece of gear has to have it okay but MIDI in and MIDI out are the biggies now some gear gets around this problem especially some of the alesis stuff by having switchable MIDI through or out so you can turn it into a through connection or an out connection depending upon what you need for your system which is a clever way to get you know three Jack's work out of two so and it's much greater than leaving out the through Jack and Riley you know you can sort of choose what you want so there are some variations in there and in spat in fact speaking of variations I should say that because the MIDI spec is so wide-ranging and offers so many different forms of control not just what we've talked about here not all pieces of equipment implement all pieces of the mini specification for example this keyboard produces pressure other keyboards don't they don't produce any pressure data at all but they will respond to pressure data coming in or they might not respond to pressure data so all the options are out there whether the company that develops the product chooses to use them all or not to use them all it's up to them yeah and it's also a question of expense you know how much you can bring a product in for I mean if you start going nuts with the software and having it do everything that's possible you know that's that's obviously going to cost more and the other thing is that some things are just not important like if you have a keyboard that's just designed for live performance and doesn't have a sequencer or drum sounds or anything like that and it who needs timing data ok let's talk about some other aspects of the MIDI specification we talked about the performance stuff right let's and all that let's look at program change a second now I have in the rack over there I have a quad reverb GT and you're wondering yeah I know the quad reverb but I'm not sure about the GT the DT is a is a brand-new unit in fact it's so new it doesn't exist in the real world yet this is the other world this is a prototype that I managed to steal from the alesis R&D people for this video and so we can have something hot and new and happening here but it's not it's not actually a finished model but it'll serve the purposes now what it is is it's a quad reverb that has a whole analog section for guitar players and so we'll be doing some guitar stuff later so rather than switch units around it I thought you know we'll use this and they said but it's not finished I submit doesn't matter ok so anyway so we got the quad reverb in there ok and what I want to show you is that there's a concept called program change and the way this all started was because you have ok let suppose you have your master keyboard on stage you have your sound generators off stage if you change your sound on your master keyboard you gonna change sounds on your remote sound generators with a long stick with a very long stick but that's exactly right called a MIDI cable and that very long stick carries program change information that says aha a program has been changed on the master keyboard and I will change to the program I'm supposed to change to now that you're not just limited to doing this with with sound generators signal processors can do that as well because you might have for example on program one you might want to have a real long echo and on program to a chorus effect on program three a big hall reverb and again it would be very inconvenient to go over and you know reset the quad reverb by the time you want to do something like that so it will respond automatically to a program change on here now take a look at the quad reverb the DT screen there for a second okay right now it's on program zero there which is an echo course delay reverb that's what's giving this reverb sound here now let's suppose that we want to have more of a mellow chorus sound okay what I can do is call up a program change on here now it's just changed to stereo chorus now when I play I've taken the brightness off a bit and you know it's a little bit mellower and the chorus effect is more pronounced and there's a lot less reverb now I can now there's another let's call up another program here and this one puts Maurice into deep space it uses the ever-popular ring modulator effect on the quad reverb and get some real Spacey sounds here a bit eerie a bit area but that just goes to show I mean what a wide variations of sounds you can get was just one button press and it's right there if I had had to go over between songs andreat we call the settings Quadra her to go from the stereo chorus to the ring modulator I mean you know it wouldn't be it wouldn't look too good on stage no it wouldn't everybody was getting bored they leave the band would never get signed you know it might be good for the bar people would go over and take a break or something but that's about the only benefit I could see and and the way you got the program changes to the clutter of GT was by pressing a key on the keyboard or or something else you do well there's a lot of different ways you can do it in synthesizers generally what happens is as soon as you call up a patch or a program it sends that data down the MIDI line on the EPS here you can leave the same program on the keyboard and enter a specific program change using this number keypad so you can just enter like program 99 or 36 or whatever and that's because this is a sampler and samplers tend to have less programs on board at one time so you might want to be able to add different effects to the same basic program the res allows you to do that okay okay so that's what that's what the program changed seeing is all about other units might allow you to to just increment with every press of a footswitch to go through the programs that way so if you have something set up on stage where you have a specific order and you know you're going to be doing things in a certain way instead of having to call up program 32 there's five I want to just step through the foot switch right but I should also I should also tell you about the MIDI consumer weirdness alert which is every now and then you'll run into little parts of the MIDI specification that don't quite jive in one way or another it's usually not a technical problem in other words you'll still get the program change but sometimes the nomenclature is different from unit to unit okay for example on this on the on the EPS while there are 128 possible program changes okay the question is some manufacturers number their programs as 0 to 127 others number it is 1 to 128 still others breaking into groups of banks like Bank a might have patches one through eight like a1 a2 a3 a4 all the way through a8 and then you would switch over to Bank B which would be b1 b2 and b3 228 or yeah whatever they'd show yeah it would be like you know mm7 or whatever you know and m8 or whatever would be the last patch so that's that's a little bit of a complication right there in fact if you if you look real closely you could see that the call up program one on the quad reverb GT and I was sending it program change to from here because the eps numbers from 1 to 128 and the quad reverb 0 to 120 right but you'll find that that's it's not really as big a deal as you might think because after a while you just sort of get mentally used to saying oh yeah this is unit that does it this way and it's it's not like there's one that's a lot more common than another over that's there's a pretty pretty good mix and match between I mean that the Bank thing is starting to pretty much go by the wayside now although there's still some units that the number of things that way so that's that's one thing that you need to be concerned about another another possible problem occurs well not a problem so much which is something you need to be aware of suppose you have a signal processor or a sound generator that only has 64 programs in it instead of 128 what happens if you send it program 65 hmm what happens if you send at 72 it might double back and go through that same group of 64 again you know we're 65 would call up one and 66 we call up to but it might ignore it it might go into hyperspace if it's a really old e in it you know might do any one of a number of different things so what I like to do when I get a new piece of gear is I have a little test sequence made up that sends out program change numbers and I just look at the display and see what gets called up and I have a little reference card that says okay this unit goes from 0 to 127 or this one does banks or this one wraps around after 64 or you know whatever so that's so you should be aware that there are some little complications like that another complication occurs if you have something with 300 patches you what happens if you want to call a patch number 276 now there's two ways around this one is a fairly new aspect of the MIDI specification called MIDI Bank select what MIDI Bank select does is it allows you to choose banks of 128 programs ok so that's one way that's very new though it's not common at all just a couple pieces of gear starting to come out with it now like I said the mini spec is constantly evolving right but this is a knight but again this also points out something which is that these banks are still in groups of 128 right so you're not obsoleting everything that came before you can still access the first Bank just like before and if you have a if you have a piece of equipment with Bank select and your master can't generate that just select the bank on the piece of gear and you can still select any one hundred twenty-eight programs within that Bank from your old piece of mini gear I think that's very considerate frankly now there's another way around that problem which is called mapping what meant what mapping does in fact this is a feature that's in the quad reverb it lets you redirect an incoming program change and translate it to a different number so you could set it up on the quad reverb so that when it sees program change to coming in you can set up a little table where it will call up program 33 or 46 or whatever in the quad reverb and this is very much it's like a it's like a little table one from column a one from column B you set up what program is coming in and what program you want to call up and as long as you have table turned on but in the instead of just program change on or off it will translate things according to that table now believe it or not this is actually getting into pretty esoteric stuff but it's is it making sense so far yeah it really is it's it's it's not as confusing as I thought I but one point thought of MIDI as audio information and thinking if I play the chord they would go out the MIDI port and appear in a pair of speakers mm-hmm but that's not true it goes out as data and then goes to a sound source and then appears as as a sound all right you're right that numeric data has to be converted into something we can hear think of it like a CD I mean a CD doesn't record sound it records numbers right but there's a little mechanism in there or a circuit I should say that translate those numbers and reconstructs an audio signal from it and it's the same kind of thing here when you send that MIDI data to another sound generator it reconstructs your performance based on the data that it gets in fact another application a very popular MIDI application is called sequencing and all this means is that you send the data into something like an EM MTA right is a you know pretty common eight-track sequencer and what it does is it remembers the data that it received and the order received it in so if you press down to see it remembers that a C was pressed at this particular time in the song and so forth now if you take the MIDI out from the sequencer and plug it into the MIDI in of the sound generator it'll just play that data right back in it's just like a player piano it's like a high tech player piano okay but instead of having a piano roll that's like punched with holes you have memory that's punched with data okay okay so you punch your data in memory you send it back in you just don't see the keys move up and down - that's too bad yeah well you know they're working on it but anyway you do get this basic kind of high-tech player piano in fact with the sequencer and that's all sequencer is see people originally got confused because they tend they tried to relate it to a tape recorder and it's not really the same thing it's just storing your performance data has nothing to do with sound right just storing storing them if you want as if your performance that also means so that five years from now when you sold this keyboard and gone on to something with 32-bit sampling and and four gigabytes of memory or something like that you can still take that original sequence put it right into the MIDI in and you'll get your performance recreated maybe with hotter sounds or different sounds or better sounds or whatever but your performance is still right there and it would have been really great if this has been around in the 18 and 17 1600 no then that wouldn't have to have arguments about how Bach wrote really wrote his music right but anyway so that's some those are that's the so so far we've got the performance type thing we have some of the housekeeping ideas about the program changes to make your life easier there's also a whole aspect of the MIDI specification that relates to synchronization and this is a most wonderful addition because synchronization before MIDI was a really hit or miss proposition and this really just cleaned up the whole world of synchronization mini synchronization confuses a lot of people but the basics are very simple what usually causes problems is if someone has something set to receive something it shouldn't be receiving or has some kind of MIDI feedback loop set up where it's receiving two different tempo sources or whatever so try to ignore all the bad news you've heard about mini sync and just focus on the fact that there are really only a few important aspects of it okay now as an example let's assume we have the SR 16 which is a drum machine right and the MMT 8 sequencer hooked up these are both rhythmically oriented devices and if we have them playing together of course when the SR 16 is playing measure 8 we sure want the MMT 8 to be playing what's recorded in measure 8 as well right unless you want to get really a pond card you know but generally you want to have these two things synchronized together yeah so what happens is one becomes the transmitter that the master of this relationship the other is the receiver or the slave if you want to start a sequence there's a start command and what when you start this when you start the sequence it will tell the drum machine to start playing its pattern when you press stop it will tell the drum machine you'll never guess this stop playing space you got it what's smarter already hey this isn't wonderful mini raises your IQ if you do it right but anyway one of the interesting thing about the stop is that when it stops it stops you at exactly the point where it stopped it doesn't do anything more and so like if you stop at the end of the fourth measure it just sits at the end of the fourth measure now from there you can do one of two things either you can press start in which case it goes back to beginning starts in the beginning or you can press continue and what continue does is it picks up where you left off and you'll notice here on the MMT 8 that in addition to you know the track selection other buttons that the three main buttons here you're dealing with our play stop continue and record uh-huh so what stop continue means is you can stop it and if you hit it again it will continue from that point that's that's a handy thing to have oh yeah yeah it really is because well there's a lot of situations where you might want to if you're doing a song you don't want to have to go back to the beginning each time if you want to like just work on the chorus or something like that what you want to stop it and then maybe go back a few measures and continue from that point where a start would always kick you back to the beginning see like again on the MMT 8 you can fast-forward or rewind through the sequence you know go ahead a few measures are back and then if you press continue it'll pick up from wherever you stopped hmm how does it know though really where it stopped if it's the eighth measure and the sequencer how does it know how does the drum machine know to start on the eighth measure on the drum machine doesn't know that well that's that's the remaining piece of the MIDI sync puzzle called song position pointer okay and this is a this is the most wonderful part of the MIDI spec in terms of timing because it allows for very cheap inexpensive easy auto location between different units what song pointer does all it does again let's let's look at the MMT 8 as a master when you press start on that there's a little counter inside that keeps track of how many sixteenth notes have elapsed since the beginning of the tune okay so let's let's suppose you're about to start playing a tune you have these hooked up properly you have the MIDI out from the sequence here going into the midian of the SR 16 you press start on on the MMT eight goes into the SR 16 and those two sequences start playing the phone rings you hit stop okay and then meanwhile your dog ate the SR 16 or something change the pattern the you kick the AC adapter out when you ran over to the phone or something like that the mt8 stones uh knows where it is but the SR 16 at this point it could very well be lost you might have been reset back to the beginning or anything like that so how do you get it back well remember the MMT 8 has been keeping track of how many sixteenth notes are in there when you press Continue on that before it actually continues the first thing it does is it sends out the song position pointer message to the SR 16 and the SR 16 says oh where am I in the song gets the message and sets itself to that point and then continues on from that point so what this also means is that you can start it again a situation where you're just saying you're doing an overdub on the very last chorus of a tune and you're you're recording a part into the MMT no problem you can just like go to that to that particular point in the song press Continue and the SR 16 will pick up each time from that same point it used to be in the old days before you had sung pointer you'd have to start a sequence and a drum machine from the beginning every time even if you just went over to have the last two beats so you have to sit there and you'd fall asleep and he forget to do it so you have to go back to the beginning again you'd have to you know and I'll tell you if you just have to like really over the one critical drum hit or something waiting for three minutes do that one hit the odds of that you're gonna blow it right but this way it's just a lot simpler and that's really all there is to many synchronization the problems that people have is that something like a drum machine like the SR 16 it can be the MIDI transmitter or the MIDI receiver in other words you could have this drive the MMT 8 you could have the MMT 8 drive the SR 60 now also the EPS has a sequencer inside that so you can actually sync two of these sequencers to the drum machine or have the EPS as the master driving both of these or have the SR 16 driving both these sequencers or whatever and the problem is is that if they're all set up to transmit MIDI information and they're all set up to receive MIDI information timing information you know they'll all be trying to drive each other and you're easy going across the Medicare so you just may have to make sure that you have it set right that you know if you have all these MIDI cables connected that if this the master this is sending out MIDI data you know MIDI timing data but it's not listening to what's coming in and these are said only to listen and not send and that sort of thing that's where most of the problems come in it really has nothing to do with the MIDI sync process itself which is pretty close to to failsafe operator error basically you know what what you can and can't do is and no in the machine right you know in fact one thing I should mention before we move on to the next part is that most people think of synthesizer programming is something kind of difficult and abstract uh-huh but it's getting to the point now where it's all pretty standard where you have different menus that relate to different aspects of the unit's operation like timing or MIDI or whatever and then different pages within that menu you know like let's suppose you have the MIDI menu called up while one page might be am I supposed to respond to timing data or not right am I supposed to be outputting note data are listening to note data you know that kind of thing each one will have a page and then on each page there's a parameter like on or off or a value from 0 to you know one twenty seven or whatever and generally the process of programming is you just work down you find the menu that contains the function you want to change you find the page that contains the proper parameter you change the parameter change them all one by one till you have what you have what you want is the same thing for the quad reverb you know if you look at the way the buttons are laid out on that you see that says like reverb delay pitch EQ uh-huh well those are all the different menus so if you want to change the EQ just press the EQ button and then you see the page right that pit the page of buttons and the value buttons page gets you to different pages in the menu and value changes the parameter value piece-of-cake saying it's the same thing on the EPS you call you have different pages I mean it's harder to see here but you have different menus you call different pages you find it from parameters you adjust them I guess the word menu is something we're all familiar with oh yeah yeah it's the same thing here like look at these buttons you have drum set record setup MIDI setup and the again these are all things you can you can look at well here's a real good example let's look at MIDI setup okay there you can set MIDI channel which we'll get into a bit and you can go through different pages and you know do you want the drum notes being sent out how do you want to assign notes do you want the clock to go out or you know all that stuff and then you can vary the actual values with these parameter buttons so it's getting to the point where even if you come to a unit cold and you don't you know and or there's a sketchy manual or a manual written never sketching manuals up especially if it's written in a language other than English usually if you know to look for menus pages and parameters you can sort of muddle your way through you know if there's a button labeled MIDI try pressing that if you need to change the mini thing right what happens you know so anyway I just wanted to get that in so are you pretty clear on what midis doing so far yep basically what I understand is that when you press a play a chord and you're on your keyboard for example MIDI information is sent out the MIDI out port which is then sent to a MIDI in device which then figures out how to translate it depending on how you have set it up previously or how it's factory defaults are set up and also that you should really learn your your gear learn its little nuances and and play with a little bit before you go and get involved in real big project oh yeah that's that's that's a real important point because well just let's take signal processors an example some will only respond to program changes so you can move the pitch Bend wheel all year and there's nothing that it will do to the sound another unit might respond to pitch Bend but unless you've set a parameter to be controlled by pitch Bend it's not going to make any difference right so you actually have to know those kinds of ins and outs and throughs I suppose in this case and and the more you know the piece of gear the more you'll be able to do with it but I should also mention I I know that the intimidation factor is something that really kind of boggles people in that you know they get something like a quad reverb and they oh gosh look at all these pages and many as in parameters and right but the thing is once you sort of figured one of those things out you know the learning curve is steepest at the beginning the learning curve for MIDI kind of you know goes up real real I mean it's like a real steep curve at first and then you start seeing more and more commonalities between different units right and then after a while you can just sit down to something you've never seen before and make it do something useful uh-huh so you know don't get discouraged in the early part cuz that's the that's the hardest part it's like playing guitar when you don't have calluses yet right now once you've built up your calluses then you can play you know as much as you want and I sometimes afraid of mathematics because it's just an overwhelming subject and you can do so much with it with MIDI it is very mathematically involved but you don't see that aspect of it no the only probably use handled through a cable you don't see if you don't adjust bits and bytes oh no no you never have to get in there and like well I mean you can if you're a serious MIDI hacker and you want to go around customizing things and if you can get in there but for you know normal humanoid biped musicians types you don't really have to think about that stuff at all because that's what engineers are getting paid for right now it's their job to figure that out the only numbers you have to remember is like you know G program 60 is the one with the great breasts and or something like that and I mean of course there'll be some number adjustments like pitch Bend range you want it to go 5 semitones or 2 semitones or whatever but those are numbers that we're all used to dealing with right the important thing is you know you don't have to worry about the number of bits that are being sent out you don't have to worry about the timing or anything like that that's all taken care of for you just it's a musical instrument I mean it's important to never lose sight of the fact that the whole reason why MIDI exists is to let you hook a bunch of stuff together into a system and it's supposed to make life easier for you let you be more creative exactly and it should now I granted when you're first getting started with it you'll do things like you know you'll be trying to trigger the drums from the keyboard or something and nothing will happen and then you'll forget that you forgot to you know you didn't turn on the the drums the drum notes in or you forgot to send to the same channel or something like that right but after a while you'll start to develop sir Stables set up and boy you can just turn that thing on and be making music within within minutes and and recording it into your sequencer and triggering signal processor changes and all this stuff and of course it's great for live 2 which we'll be getting into a little bit great I really appreciate you making me not feel as uncomfortable about MIDI well again it's it's a little difficult at first but just hang in there because the more you play with it the more it becomes obvious and after a while it's like a logarithmic type of response you know it's just everything be it past the certain point everything just kind of clicks in your head and you go yeah I got it and then you'll become really the master of this whole thing great so I think maybe okay now you have the basics down you understand the concept of data you know that we're not dealing with audio when it comes to MIDI but with numbers that are going out and the performance data the program changes synchronization that's really the essence of the MIDI specification now I think what we need to get into is how to hook things up okay and also MIDI modes and channels which still causes a lot of confusion with people great let's do it okay

Channel: Max Swineberg

Views: 16,858

Keywords: QuadraVerb GT, SR-16 Drum Machine, MMT-8 Sequencer, Controller, alesis, MIDI (File Format), instructional, how to, history, eps keyboard, Synthesizer (Musical Instrument), ensoniq eps signature series, ensoniq esp 16 plus

Id: Q9PH_pVeOaM

Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2014