The last time you listened to a midi file cover?

[ghettosynth]

I heard Satie Gnossienne 1, maybe for the first time, back in 2011 or whenever...
The person I was working with, who was writing some word things for the project at that time, suggested doing some covers. So this tune captivated me. I wanted to get on it tout de suite, so I found a MIDI! Hey...
(kunstderfuge dot com)

Thanks for the link, fits right in with my current project.

[Aleatoriac]

After Bowie died last year, I downloaded MIDI files for a bunch of his tunes and created some truly horrendous Casio-tonal renditions.

Sell the recordings! This could be the next big genre.

I mean look, we've only been dealing with Brostep for about 5 years now, right? That ought to tell you anything can be a thing.

My latest midi file experience was through my recently reactivated Korg X3R, rummaging through some old floppies trying to find some work I did that I did back up to CD, lost the CDs, and to a hard-drive, which is now also dead... And found "Them to Star Trek Deep Space 9" *.sng file that I had customized from someone else's midi performance back in... 1995.

Tragic, I know. The things an old man does with his ever shrinking span of time.

[jancivil]

Floppy disks. Ok, if it's old people story time... I had some compositions written on some system before there even was MIDI software; which I had recovered my floppy for, but this was some old shit, even by the, what was this, the early 90s? The early 00s? I had to go see Leuenberger, whose employees were trying to give me the bum's rush with such a request. BUT he had given that floppy to his son out in Marin County which he went out to retrieve for me, as he recalled me from the DX7 'workshops' in the '80s. When that was the breaking music tech news.

Actually I'm not certain there was nothing MIDI then, but I remember when Digital Performer was called Digital Composer. There was no Windows OS I don't think. Synclavier never was MIDI.
MIDI was achieved via a serial port on the 128k MacIntosh. The OS was on a floppy, FFS. Serial port and an adapter. Software was really hazardous then.
This was a while before the Ensoniq Mirage and the LCD readout the size of my thumb where sample looping required entering HEX. Then there was software for that, like the next year.

- this story doesn't even make sense to me

[Aleatoriac]

I had some compositions written on some system before there even was MIDI software;

Geez!

[jancivil]

The other way(s)? In the case of transcribing music to midi, maybe some transcribers has not worked hard at all but simply have access to better transcribing tools. And they would not be good at all at transcribing without those tools but achieved "professional" results because they used the right tools. That would be the other way.

And I would rather use those tools than get good at transcribing music because ...

For a person as verbose as you are, your reading of what is said to you is mighty selective. The subject of my words to you, clearly now, was <transcribing music>. Hence:
What are the other ways to get good at a thing (other than working at the thing itself)?

One more time and I'm out: if you want to know what's in a song, you find out for real by this thing we're using the word 'transcribing' for. If you don't care to, that's no skin off anybody but why talk about all this other jive? That's fine, too, just sayin'

[jancivil]

I had some compositions written on some system before there even was MIDI software;

Geez!

[jancivil]

[ghettosynth]

MIDI was achieved via a serial port on the 128k MacIntosh. The OS was on a floppy, FFS. Serial port and an adapter. Software was really hazardous then.

Not that it matters, but, whatever, this thread has a life of it's own, but, MIDI is a straightforward serial protocol. The only thing that makes it different from more well known serial ports is that the physical interface and baud rate are different. (I'm simplifying here to be less boring). So, if you could set the baud rate to a non-standard setting, all you needed was an adapter for the physical connection.

Had the standards committee chosen a standard baud rate such as 38400 then the same approach could have been done with PCs.

[jancivil]

The hazard then was for instance unplugging the MIDI meant serious damage to the file, which we found out LIVE when one of the visual people unplugged it. Good thing we knew from improvisation, that computer music was now f**ked_UP. Of course I have no more idea of why than I did of the special diff on baud rates or what-have-you. The OS on a floppy seems suspect today.

[trewq]

And its always fun to transform a part of one into a seed for totally new music.

Yeah, I do this quite a bit. I like transforming classical pieces into ambient/noise works.

Transform everything to ambient noise

[tapper mike]

A few things to touch on here....

Regarding midi file damage. If you used an old computer and the computer was abruptly shut off then it's possible that the file was being altered at time of performance and that it wasn't / couldn't be saved properly before shut down. This happened quite often way back when.


The type of sounds used by the device used in playback are based on the player used to play them back. Yup if you have a crappy sound card and are using the default midi player you will only have access to the crappy virtual instruments that the player has installed/ will allow. You can import any midi fine into almost every daw on the market. And use the included soundset of the daw or swap those tones out with your additional virtual instrument plugins. That's what you are recording to when you use a virtual plugin is .mid encapsulated in a larger file. This of course will not affect the quantization or lack of transcription from the original file you received. The data type capacity has always been there but not fully realized due to constraints in the processing/performance of those early slow computers and limited functionality software.

I was on the original usenet midi user group. We would write to midi and share files often. This was long before what we commonly refer to the internet existed. Not even browsers. everything was still mail servers and ftp. Most were less then stellar due to the poor quality of midi recording at the time. But that didn't stop us from trying. And that's the thing about today. (Yes I'm old) we made the most of what we had rather then waiting for something to come along and make it easier. It was those few early adapters that make it possible for music production software companies to stay in business (along with computer technology) and push the boundaries so that we could have the modern computers and software of today.

A funny thing about being part of a community and watching it grow and decline as decades go by. Sometimes the best at transcribing a song may not be the best at performing it. That's because so much effort is made in one area (the writing) that the other area can fall short. Many of the best midi transcribers / tabbers had this same issue. But I still would be thankful for the effort made.


As it stands now...The publishers war on midi has worked extremely well. While years back when both original and cover material would sit on multiple sites across the web. Most have been shut down for good. It seems if you write to midi as a compositional tool, publishers automatically assume it's theirs the minute you publish it to the web. One of the oddball quirks is that no one buys sheet music anymore with or without the advent of midi. Publishing house sheet music has always been a mixed bag of nuts to begin with. Transcribers are paid (when they are paid) for quickness not accuracy. You do have to keep an open mind while reading scores. Songs are often transposed to "easy keys" for beginners. Which is less of a problem if you have a jazz background as many songs are recorded and re recorded by different artists over the years in different keys.

Getting back to the publishers war.... A long time back there was this site called MySongBook. Started by a company specializing in guitar transcription software.... The makers of guitar pro. They had this site were users could upload gp files to the web of transcriptions for originals and covers. The print publishers had it shut down due to infringement issues and were not willing to work with the site holders. It took decades of falling sales for the publishers to finally allow MySongBook to reopen and reap the benefits of being paid for the transcriptions of others. Mostly because they(the publishers) wanted to charge beyond the level of reasonableness to the site owners and content users. Now it's much more reasonable (sort of what happened with mp3dotcom.

[harryupbabble]

Sometimes the best at transcribing a song may not be the best at performing it. That's because so much effort is made in one area (the writing) that the other area can fall short.

I once had a debate with Bruce Lee fans. They claim Bruce Lee could have beaten Muhammad Ali in a fight. I said something like "Wake up fools, life is not a movie. Bruce Lee was not a real fighter, he must have spent most of his time in front of a mirror trying to find the best looking fight moves for his films, he was not a professional fighter, he was an actor.".

It urinated them off. Still, I pressed on and repeated the same point and was sort of being a Richard by adding something like "Bruise easiLee was an excellent martial arts movie maker but it's just hard to believe he could even actually win championship fights against fighters with similar weight, like Sugar Ray Leonard, let alone the heavyweight champion of the world".

And Bruce Lee's defense for not being a professional fighter might have been "I have no time to focus on championship fights because I'm too busy making great martial arts films". And there's nothing wrong with that. Ideally, one should get good at what one chose to focus on. And maybe Bruce Lee knew deep down that he would be demolished by the pro fighters because the pros took real punches regularly and probably even got knocked out sometimes but maybe they got tougher and got used to it and developed some kind of resistance to real pain. It's not movie pain.

[Aleatoriac]

Transform everything to ambient noise

Beautiful

[jancivil]

Ah, it weren't midi files what was damaged during that event.
I looked it up, 'Personal Composer' was released around then, but this was not that (I didn't see that until '87 or even '88), and again, I had my files (not those files, others from this time) but I had to go to Leuenberger who had to borrow the program back from his son for me to see the score again.
The actual MIDI port may have been that thing Dave Oppenheim built right around that time, "connected to the printer and modem ports (RS-422)" http://www.kvraudio.com/focus/the_early ... cers_15670
and this could well have been MIDIMAC Sequencer. Which is the only thing I can ascertain that was out by early '86 for the Mac.
It wasn't running, I never imagined that the guy disconnecting the MIDI during soundcheck would ruin the sequences. This notation program was easily the most sophisticated thing on that computer. There was nothing back then. You wouldn't believe how primitive it all was.

I was not around for the early internet, I did very little before 2003. The first actual MIDI composing I did was in Finale 2004 talking to a Roland XV5050. It was unworkable as a playback engine whatsoever. I didn't download anybody's MIDI before that Satie Gnossienne 1. 2012?
I feel duty-bound to note that a number of those things at that site I linked to are "Live" "Quality" performances and copyrighted. So watch out. If you're just going to fvck them over I guess no one will be the wiser.

THAT is my entire experience of 'MIDI Covers', I definitely pored over that guy's reading of 2 or 3 things. I went rather hog wild with those projects. Two of them were the quantized <Dead> MIDIs. I stole some of his pedaling in one of the "Live"! But that's about it.