Production Basic - Understanding MIDI (Part 1)

Hi all, have you ever seen or heard about "MIDI" but does not know what the hell is it? well, it is a little bit complicated, but once you grasp the idea, it will help you in electronic music production, and also DJing. MIDI is essentially a communications protocol or common language (in a digital form) that enables any MIDI-equipped electronic instruments to be linked together in a musically useful way. "MIDI" stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

MIDI compatible instruments and devices are connected to each other using the MIDI Cable with 5-pin DIN plugs on either hand.

Electronic Keyboard Instruments, The sound produced from these instruments is created by circuitry, not by something being hit, bowed, or blown. Let's take an example of a piano, you hit the tuts, it activates the string and produced sounds, right? For electronic instruments, let's say a synthesizers, the keys on a keyboard generate electronic signals to tell the internal circuitry what note to play and how loud to play it. when you pressed a key of a synthesizer, it sends "Note on" message and the note/sound come out. If you release the key, it sends "Note off", and the sound will stop to come out. For the loudness of the sound, it depends on how hard you pressed the key, which is the same as how fast you pressed the key. This loudness is known with the term of "Velocity" (Sounds familiar?)

If pitch, Note On, Note Off and Velocity information all exists in the form of electronic signals, it must be possible to send these signals along a piece of wire and use them to control the sound generating circuitry in another electronic instrument, and it's precisely that concept which is the basic of MIDI (Keep this in mind, the keywords are: Circuitry, Wire transfer, electronic signals)

MIDI does not mean of transmitting audible sounds, it transmitting instructions or messages. Let's make an analogy here, a written musical score (those musical transripts) and MIDI Data. The written musical score, gives music players (Piano, Guitar, etc) instructions of the beat, tempo, Notes to be played, and many more, but it DOES NOT give audible sounds (I have not met any written musical instrument that can give audible songs to the person who read it). That's exactly what a MIDI data is, same like the musical score. Move on

If we plug the MIDI Out of the keyboard we are physically playing (the Master keyboard) into the MIDI In socket of another MIDI instrument (the Slave), then the slave is able to play the notes as performed on the master keyboard (Just think and imagine that you are playing a keyboard, and remember everything i wrote above to understand this "Master - Slave" thing).

To understand how the control of multiple modules is possible without them all playing at once, all of the time, the concept of MIDI channels has to be introduced, and this is exactly what i will wrote you guys about tomorrow. Subscribe to this blog for more infos and updates, you won't regret it, Enjoy:)

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