need better mental model on the subject of midi

[twistfinger]

hi. i don't know where to ask this so i'll just ask it here.

could someone explain a little about what midi is? when i think of midi, i think of those old crappy midi files that play beepy type sounds of mozart and beethoven back when windows 95 came out. it seems to me that a wav can be whatever it wants to be, but in my mind, a midi is restricted to cheesy beep notes. is midi better than that? what can be done with midi that makes it not obsolete? what is a midi controller and midi interface?

i don't have a good mental model of what midi is and faqs aren't really helping me. could someone just clear me up with some common basic knowledge of this?

thanks.

[Hink]

hi. i don't know where to ask this so i'll just ask it here.

could someone explain a little about what midi is? when i think of midi, i think of those old crappy midi files that play beepy type sounds of mozart and beethoven back when windows 95 came out. it seems to me that a wav can be whatever it wants to be, but in my mind, a midi is restricted to cheesy beep notes. is midi better than that? what can be done with midi that makes it not obsolete? what is a midi controller and midi interface?

i don't have a good mental model of what midi is and faqs aren't really helping me. could someone just clear me up with some common basic knowledge of this?

thanks.

midi has nothing to do with waves in the technical sense. Remember the old time player pianos, think of it like that. A midi file is like the roll. But it's more a roll for a player piano/keyboard/synth/metronome/engineer/more.

for instance you can write a score in a sequencer and create a midi file. A midi file can have 16 channels of information on them. If you were to plug it into a multi-timbral (meaning being able to play back multiple instruments at once, usually 16) Keyboard it will play the sounds you assign to each channel. In addition midi will carry the info on how hard you played the note (s), how long you held the note(s). Some will send what fx you used, expression pedal you used, pitch bend and mod.

It doesn't matter if you change the sound source it will play any midi bank. Usually it's GM, which is a universal assignment of midi channels with channel 10 always being drums.

You can also use one midi keyboard to play sounds in another keyboard, pc or hardware rack synth/module. As well as use a drum machine to play drum sounds in other modules, keyboards and soft synths in your pc.

Midi will also act as a central clock for all your devices that need to be in sync (utilizing the clock of one device you designate as the master.) In otherwords if you had a hardware sequencer and a hard disk recorder plus a pc, you can set one to be the master and the rest slaves and they will all run together when the master is started.

Finally midi can be used to automate and control many effects and mixers. Instead of sending note values and all that go with them it sends data. This data in it's simplist form is called control changes and usually have a value of 0-127. each number controlling one aspect of the deices parameters. That is of course your device has midi, the paramters that you can change via midi are listed in the manual for the device in the midi implimentation chart. Again these data changes can also be recorded in a sequencer to automate midi gear. I hope this helps some...that's about 1% of what you can do with midi but my fingers are getting tired...

[pljones]

Yes.

Slightly more concisely:

MIDI is like the score to a song or whatever - even a full concert score. You pick the instruments to play each part. If you pick cheesey 1980s naff sounds, you get it played sounding of cheesey 1980s naff sounds.

If you pick players that sound like real performers, then you get something that sounds like a real performance.

It takes more work than writing a score, though, to write a good MIDI file: good performers put feel into what they play. Unfortunately, computers aren't really up to putting feeling into anything, so the person writing the MIDI score has to do it at that point.

[foosnark]

I just had this conversation with my wife last week. Thanks to General Midi (GM) and cheap sound cards and the web, people think of MIDI as a sort of online sound format.

But it started off as simply a way to connect instruments so they could exchange some basic musical information: what notes to play, time synchronization, etc. Leaving computers out of it, you could play a synth module using a different keyboard, synchronize two drum machines, automate stage lighting in time with a song, etc.

The GM standard came along afterwards, declaring such things as "drums are on channel 10" and "patch 1 is a piano, patch 99 is a helicopter sound effect," etc. Roland Sound Canvas and other devices adopted the standard, and pretty soon every cheap computer sound card did too. That, plus a standard way of serializing MIDI song sequences in a file format, led to the kind of bland crap MIDI is famous for today.

[Andywanders]

But it started off as simply a way to connect instruments so they could exchange some basic musical information: what notes to play, time synchronization, etc. Leaving computers out of it, you could play a synth module using a different keyboard, synchronize two drum machines, automate stage lighting in time with a song, etc.

The GM standard came along afterwards, declaring such things as "drums are on channel 10" and "patch 1 is a piano, patch 99 is a helicopter sound effect," etc. Roland Sound Canvas and other devices adopted the standard, and pretty soon every cheap computer sound card did too. That, plus a standard way of serializing MIDI song sequences in a file format, led to the kind of bland crap MIDI is famous for today.

Yeah, let's not forget this.

MIDI stands for...

Musical Instrument Digital Interface

And that's just it..! A way for musical instruments (and other music equipment) to communicate with each other. How people use it is another story.

[Sascha Franck]

Thanks to General Midi (GM) and cheap sound cards and the web, people think of MIDI as a sort of online sound format.

Oh yes... and then they start to wonder why there's no vocals coming out of their less than mediocre GM versions of "Time to say goodbye" (as if that song wasn't bad enough allready without GM).
"But hey, the file is so small, I can get away with it"

Apart from that, I can't add anything to the explanations allready given, they're just fine.