The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
thequietus.com
thequietus.com
I looked into MIDI more and realized you could hook the keyboard up to your computer for composing songs, granted I had no idea how to write music. Once I ordered the cables (over the phone from a catalog!) and received them, I soon realized that the cheesy sounding songs sounded less cheesy when I played them through the keyboard rather than the SoundBlaster 16. I also learned that I could set up the keyboard to examine specific MIDI-in channels and I could learn chords and melodies from downloaded MIDI files because the keyboard would have little LEDs above each key that would light up when the notes were played.
Fast forward about a decade. Over this time, I had learned more about playing keyboard, learned guitar, and had picked up some music theory and songwriting knowledge. Now, my stupid little PSR-230 could control just about any sound imaginable through the use of VSTi's. I could record music that sounded like the stuff on CD's on my computer using either real instruments or virtual ones controlled by the PSR!
To this day, even though I have another, more advanced MIDI controller, I'll often times still use the PSR when I'm working on song ideas.
So happy birthday, MIDI! You're certainly different than my first impressions of you and you've definitely made my life richer.
Wow! It sounded great! (a Gravis Ultrasound or even a Soundblaster Wave32 were over my budget)
At that time I was enjoying mods and s3m, and usually found them better sounding, but timidity + high quality patches changed all that.
(I still listed to some midi, mods and s3m converted into .wav and burned then ripped in mp3. good old memories)
I also remember the assertion that it was going to "ruin" music because any 10 yr old could program a computer to play tempo perfect renditions of complex compositions, and yet to this day the accuracy of MIDI was always off putting.
One of my personal milestones was having a stack of instruments that were capable of 200 simultaneous voices without tape layering. That allowed the reproduction in real time of a symphony, but the biggest challenge was getting 200 separate MIDI streams running in parallel was a huge task. At one point I had 20 386 class PC's each capable of producing 10 streams. It was a silly goal since everyone else layered tracks but for me it was a weird quest to be a conductor of my own personal symphony orchestra :-)
I learned a lot about how time synchronization protocols can (and do) get screwed up in real time situations. That was fun.
For relatively little $$$, one can have hundreds of gigabytes of professional samples in VSTi plugins, and be able to render playback so good it would fool almost all listeners into thinking it was an actual, real, room miced recording.
All in the end still essentially driven by Midi.
I've seen some really great early music (1200s?) MIDIs put together by doctorates, and to simulate the early instruments, each note is hand tuned (or perhaps re-tuned using software, I'm not sure). Those instruments were not diatonic.
Additionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you could or want to, it is just that it isn't something MIDI can handle.
There are a lot of compromises and hacks and such. Recently at PyOhio I saw a presentation about the raw data of the Open Goldberg Variations, and some of the raw data from that device has pressure sensitivity readings outside of the scale of MIDI.
Most artists I see wind up using OSC. It is lower level and more general purpose, and you can convert to MIDI (lossy) if you need it. I was thinking of how to sum this up, but I guess MIDI is good for what it is good for, and like most things, aren't much help when you go down a deep rabbit hole. I love MIDI though!
This is one reason I prefer Renoise (though it's a somewhat apples to oranges match-up). It has built-in OSC support, and adding custom OSC message handlers via Lua scripting is relatively trivial.
I'm working this week to get my modular talking to Live in a useful way using the Monome and an Expert Sleepers ES-3 (8 DC coupled outputs that work as trigger, gate or CV out)
The opening in "Rhapsody in Blue" is two and a half octaves, and that's jut the first thing that comes to mind. Also, I'm sure there have been some extensions that enable this, but I don't know for sure; the Yamaha DB50XG I had came with sitar, and while I don't recall exactly the demo song included, it seemed like a reasonable facsimile of Ravi Shankar.
Since midi messages are only 8bits, you have only 127 steps of resolution. Augmenting a note beyond a certain point leads to noticeable quantization of pitch.
On a somewhat related note, the advent of MIDI and the subsequent wind-type controllers meant that I'd spent a whole bunch of money on a Lyricon the previous year for nothing...
If you go to a 6th grade band class, to where the clarinet nd sax players are not adept at embouchure, choosing reeds and assembling the instruments, you hear all knds of interesting inadvertent things. Single reeds are fantastically flexible instruments. A few months ago i noticed for the first time how similar the tones of Dolphy's bass clarinet and Coltrane's soprano sax are on the 1961 recordings.
If anybody's interested, how to play quarter tone music on sax (pg 25 in the pdf:
http://davidvaldez.blogspot.com/2012/09/quarter-tones-by-don...
Correct, pitch wheel is a 14bit message, going from 0x0000-0x3FFF. Though I do remember that stretching that out a few octaves still produces noticeable stepping.
Also, forgot that midi has a portamento time controller, where you could program the time to slide between two notes, and leave it up the the tone generator to bend the note properly.
It's used to change around the default MIDI scale, so that you can play with early scales or even scales from other cultures. It's really cool if you get it working with your keyboard. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of software that supports it, although I think Logic Pro did at some point.
The 14-bit pitchbend command can handle portamento of any range since day one. Assuming you can find a synth that isn't aliasing by the time you get to C8 (good luck), it works just fine.
Thank you MIDI.
edit: Also, anyone remember early MIDI sharing sites? Way before Napster, the MIDI/MOD scene was incredible. Still remember dreaming about the Soundfonts, AWE32 and XM!
Oh, I remember the playback of my first mp3 file with winamp on my 486 DX4 100 with 4mb RAM. I couldn't even move the mouse without getting stammered playback.
But a fun bonus was hooking it up to video games that supported putting out music in General MIDI.
In an era where everybody was listening to Adlib FM on their Tie Fighter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvD_FDS_jE
I was listening to something more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajz-m0qIDCk
Although I think my X5 actually sounded even better. (I always thought the violin and viola were a bit tinny, but the cello was fantastic, and the bass not too bad. And the choir sounded better in the lower register than that recording, though you'd still never mistake it for a real choir.)
I also recall the Day of the Tentacle theme desperately needed a good clarinet sound to sound really good. I often though the theme must have been composed on the 05/W that the X5 had the same sound set as, because it sounded that good. Alas, no Youtube love here. (Closest is the MT-32 recording, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQeQzeVmN5w , but that is way worse than the X5 rendering.)
It was an amazing little machine, especially for the money - I had great fun programming the user sound banks to do some Jean Michelle Jarre(ish) pieces.
Amazingly, I can still play those songs today on my Ubuntu machine using TiMidity [2] and my choice of SoundFont [3] files.
(Note: I'd love to find a soundfont that reproduces the wavetable from the TG100, my copy of which no longer seems to work.)
[1] http://usa.yamaha.com/products/music-production/tone-generat...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)
Later that year I got my hands on a synthesizer and a copy of MAX and it became the first 'real' programming that I did. The real-time feedback made it easy to learn and debug, while its graphical nature made it highly prone to actual 'spaghetti code' unless I properly modularized everything. I quickly learned that I was a better programmer than musician - so I set up MAX to 'cybernetically enhance' my own playing.
If it wasn't for MIDI's fairly simple protocol and MAX's powerful tools built around it, I might not even be a programmer today.
The applet versions even support MIDI input (just plug in your keyboard and you can use it to give answers to the online drills!), but the sequence of Java security disasters will probably spell the death of that feature -- when I drop applets, AFAIK there's no other in-browser way to catch MIDI input; it's frustrating as hell.
Oh, and playing MIDI-Maze [1].
Never actually used it to drive an instrument.
MIDI has survived for 30 years in an intense, worldwide marketplace without any serious competition. Name any other communication protocols in widespread use that can say that, and you've named another massive success. Most of MIDI's supposed shortcomings (to the extent that they're not operator-related) can be dealt with by extending the default hardware and doing a little programming.
It did all the SMPTE reading & writing in software. Good times.