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The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

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Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#31

Post by archagon »

th0ma5 wrote: post #5

MIDI in my mind is unfortunately incomplete, or rather, makes a lot of assumptions that are great for contemporary western music, but buckle under the strain of other ideas. 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. Additionall…

Have you heard of Scala? http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/

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.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#32

Post by th0ma5 »

archagon wrote: post #31
th0ma5 wrote: post #5

MIDI in my mind is unfortunately incomplete, or rather, makes a lot of assumptions that are great for contemporary western music, but buckle under the strain of other ideas. 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. Additionall…

Have you heard of Scala? http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ 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.

Hey err, well I may have stumbled upon this before I knew of its importance, but I could also be full of myself :P Regardless, thank you for bringing it!!

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#33

Post by stan_rogers »

chops wrote: post #24
ominous_prime wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, I was thinking of the piano arrangement, but orchestral version is opened by a clarinet, and the player usually combines a glissando and a sizable portamento (and not having much woodwind experience, I have no idea how one would create that slide, like in opening of this classic recording http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U40xBSz6Dc )

That kind of slide involves subtly easing off the holes of the clarinet, leaving partial openings. It's a skill I practiced, but never really mastered. I could slide a few notes, but it was never make it that smooth, nor could I slide that many without easing off too quickly and making the slide "jump".

There's a bit of lipping it involved (especially across the 12th), but most of the secret is to drop the back of the tongue (usually somewhat arched) to open up the chamber of the mouth/throat and allow you to play with the resonance a bit. You'll usually hear that run with a bit more of a "wah" (I'm pretty sure I remember that being the official, technical term ^_^)to the timbre than is normal for a clarinet, tightening up into a more normal timbre at the top (where, honestly, fingering is mostly wishful thinking, and has less to do with selecting overtones than lipping does).

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...

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#34

Post by philjohn »

jerf wrote: post #29

I got a Korg X5 around '95 and clocked a lot of time using it for composing. (Poorly, but nonetheless.) 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…

Fellow Korg X5 owner here (in fact, mine is still in perfect working order, sat underneath my bed).

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.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#35

Post by chops »

stan_rogers wrote: post #33
chops wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of slide involves subtly easing off the holes of the clarinet, leaving partial openings. It's a skill I practiced, but never really mastered. I could slide a few notes, but it was never make it that smooth, nor could I slide that many without easing off too quickly and making the slide "jump".

There's a bit of lipping it involved (especially across the 12th), but most of the secret is to drop the back of the tongue (usually somewhat arched) to open up the chamber of the mouth/throat and allow you to play with the resonance a bit. You'll usually hear that run with a bit more of a "wah" (I'm pretty sure I remember that being the official, technical term ^_^)to the timbre than is normal for a clarinet, tighte…

Ah yes, I forgot about all the mouth-work that went into clarinet. It's been almost 14 years since I last played with any degree of seriousness. Thanks for the reminder :) It's starting to come back.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#36

Post by ominous_prime »

afandian wrote: post #25
ominous_prime wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opening of "Rhapsody in Blue" contains a glissando, which is comprised if a fast run of the individual notes, not a continuous sweep. 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.

I can't quite remember and can't be bothered to look in the spec, but MIDI has multi-byte integer values for use in some cases, and control messages such as pitch bend use this. Could be as little as 2 bytes, but more than 1.

Ah, it's coming back to me now. Haven't really worked with midi in 15 years or so.

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.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#37

Post by jamesbritt »

dbattaglia wrote: post #7
th0ma5 wrote: post #5

MIDI in my mind is unfortunately incomplete, or rather, makes a lot of assumptions that are great for contemporary western music, but buckle under the strain of other ideas. 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. Additionall…

I always wonder if we'll ever see OSC catch on in the way MIDI has by the big name manufacturers (Roland, Korg, etc). You see it in niche interfaces like the Lemur but not much else. Even the Monome devices don't work with OSC natively, they send serial data over USB, you need software to convert it.

I'm surprised to not see OSC being included in even the upcoming version of Ableton Live.

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.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#38

Post by voltagex_ »

terhechte wrote: post #19
eclipxe wrote: post #2

I can thank MIDI for getting me into programming. I was 6 at the time and just received an awesome, second hand Yamaha keyboard with MIDI out. I spent that summer researching everything I could about connecting this amazing instrument to my 386 PC. From that research came a love of discovery, technology, openness, creation. A love affair with music was the spark that created a love affair with computing and my eventu…

My first soundcard was a GUS Ultrasound, and after that I saved for quite some time to buy an AWS64 Gold. I loved that soundcard, kept it forever. I used it with Scream Tracker 3 and later Impulse Tracker 2. I've never actually left trackers either. To this day I still use Renoise ( http://www.renoise.com ), a loose FastTracker variant with vsti, rewire, effects, and more. It was so fantastic when I could control my…

Have you tried Schism Tracker? It's an Impulse Tracker clone.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#39

Post by tibbon »

jamesbritt wrote: post #37
dbattaglia wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder if we'll ever see OSC catch on in the way MIDI has by the big name manufacturers (Roland, Korg, etc). You see it in niche interfaces like the Lemur but not much else. Even the Monome devices don't work with OSC natively, they send serial data over USB, you need software to convert it.

I'm surprised to not see OSC being included in even the upcoming version of Ableton Live. 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.

Is Live removing OSC? That's really unfortunate. I use it with my Monome right now for Live stuff.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#40

Post by terhechte »

voltagex_ wrote: post #38
terhechte wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first soundcard was a GUS Ultrasound, and after that I saved for quite some time to buy an AWS64 Gold. I loved that soundcard, kept it forever. I used it with Scream Tracker 3 and later Impulse Tracker 2. I've never actually left trackers either. To this day I still use Renoise ( http://www.renoise.com ), a loose FastTracker variant with vsti, rewire, effects, and more. It was so fantastic when I could control my…

Have you tried Schism Tracker? It's an Impulse Tracker clone.

Yeah, I liked it, but after so many years I'd forgotten most shortcuts anyway, and Renoise has an impressive set of features.
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