An old keyboard from the 80s, and there's nothing more iconic. I think from the 80s than Yamaha dx7

it's

Got those classic piano sounds and stuff. Let me find an organ. There was a hospice a classic I

Mean that they're pretty awful sounds

I'm not a keyboard player, but I think that was part of the advantage of MIDI is as someone that wasn't a great player and

didn't know a lot about sounds you could just

Worry about it later fix it change the sounds later on so the scope was much more than them with audio

But yeah the sounds were bad, then the sounds are bad. What can you do?

MIDI was something that was designed in the early eighties it came out in 1983, but there were earlier versions of it made by roland

which kind of prototypes that became midi and

I'd say it's kind of analogous in some ways to like a compression algorithm. It's very loosely analogous

So instead of say having a bass drum

That's recorded as an audio signal so you've got a microphone inside the bass drum, and you're playing the bass drum

And it would take up a lot of back in those days

I mean you weren't even really thinking about disk space because it wasn't being recorded digitally

But if it had a being it would have taken up a lot of disk space more than was possible to do

What you could do is you could get one of the bass drums and say well all the bass drum sounds are basically the same?

thing

What we do is

We'll store that one sound and then

play a note on a keyboard or

Play a note from a trigger or from a computer or something like that

And it would play that sound over and over again, and that was one of the many many uses of MIDI

But it was the idea that you control

your devices in the studio by little bits of

Information rather than containing the whole wave or whatever do you wanna do?

Middies an acronym isn't it is yeah it stands for musical instrument digital interface

Midi obviously ended up being used with computers very very early on

atari the st model and

I think a lot of other models had MIDI ports directly in on the side and because they had a graphical environment

Steinberg wrote Cubase I believe it was still it was Steinberg back then they wrote a piece of software called

Cubase which was an early MIDI sequencer which is still going today today as a full-blown

audio and MIDI package in fact we're probably end up using that a bit later, but back in those days you could

effectively create a whole composition on a computer and trigger off the sounds from various of sound modules and samplers and whatever else and and

It would produce these files that were maybe a captain of K in size

But could have a whole arrangement which back in those days was was phenomenal

So let's get into a bit more technical stuff in MIDI

there's these things called channels, so there's 16 channels which are from the

Users point of view numbered 1 to 16, but internally 0 to 15 for obvious reasons

And they basically you could see a channel as as a way of addressing different pieces of equipment

And there's also a mode called, Omni, which means it would listen to all channels

So if you wanted to say have a piece of equipment that had that just did the piano

Another piece of equipment that just did the drums another one that just did the bass you could

Set them to different channel numbers internally you could go to their settings as I only want to listen to

channel 3 on this particular piece of equipment and

Then you could have different tracks within your MIDI sequencer

That would only put that data to channel 3 and only put that data to channel 1. Let's say so you could have

effectively

One signal that would carry all the data for the entire song

This is like one set of cabling that perhaps all connected to all of the equipment. Would yeah, I mean the way

I mean, there's this all sorts of complicated ways of

cabling up MIDI with distribution boxes

But the the most simple way to do it would be to go out of your

computer or your sequencer or whatever into your keyboard and then out of the

keyboard out

Of that one to the next one or should mention at this point the actual MIDI

The look of MIDI cables so I mean this is the back of a focus right?

stereo

Sound card here, so as you can see the the standard MIDI in and out are the 5-pin din

sockets similar to the socket that was used on a tape machine to put programs into an old computer like

My old icon lecture on BBC, so we've linked all these machines together

So so one let's let's strip it down because it's all very well to say there's 16 channels as with anything

It's better to explain it simplified

So let's forget the fact. There's 16 channels

and just go with one channel, so let's say we've got a keyboard and a piano module and that's all we're dealing with and

There are five types of messages that you get

That MIDI can transmit and receive and the first of which which is

probably the most used are what's called the channel voice signals and the channel voice signals are very similar to

Cable signals from a computer keyboard or anything else, and if you've ever done any programming

or sort of dealt with anything

Events in JavaScript or something like that. You'd know that there's sort of Mouse down mouse up events keydown keyup

events and you get the same thing with keyboards

So the channel voice settings will say on channel 1. I'm going to send a note down, and then a note up

So you can record the length of the time that the note was down you can also on some cables with aftertouch say how much

pressure

Yeah, how much pressure you're applying after the event you can say how much pressure you initially touched it with the volume of the note

And a whole host of other things like the modulation wheel and you've then got after that channel mode signals

Which I'm not going to go into

But they're just basic satellite little reset signals and system signals and stuff like

And then you've got what's called a system common messages, which are things that are sent to every device in the system

So if you had a whole load of sound modules it send it to all of them

And then you've got system real-time signals, which are things like your time code in your clock

All that kind of stuff, and then you've got what's called system exclusive signals or see sex as they're called for short

which is slightly a backup and restore can be used for backup and restore functionality, so let's say you've got a sound module and

In that sound module you've got a load of different

Piano sounds and you've tweaked these piano sounds to have a certain amount of sustain and whatever and you want to save those settings

you can use your audio sequence or a piece of software to record the MIDI data out of that and then when you

dump the system exclusive data

It dumps that into your computer

and then you can retrieve it back and restore the settings on your on your module so a

nice easy way in the early eighties to

Backup and restore things amongst other things each unit that's the whole point of system exclusive that the stuff that that can do is

Exclusive to the individual unit MIDI sounds like it's a very useful and kind of specialist

application in in studios

And and is that was that?

Is that what we're talking about MIDI has been used that long because that's what it found its you

Well it started like that, but no I mean, it's it's used all over the place. It was this thing that came out

some little bit of time after the MIDI spec came out called general MIDI which kind of

standardized

What you should find on each channel so for example channel one would be a piano channel 10 was for drums and in the 80s?

And 90s people who were playing computer games particularly on early pcs

They would have had maybe a Sound Blaster card, and then that meant that say computer game

manufacturers could put music along with their game

Where they were recording the note information?

Again keeping the file sizes really small and then that would be fed into your sound card to create

whatever fully sort of symphonic

Piece of music you wanted in the background of the game, so if you had a really good sound card

But really good sounds the music on that game might sound really good

And if you had a really cheap sound card the music on that game could be really cheap

but the fun was behind it was still MIDI and

That was all over the place another thing that MIDI gets used for in this day and age

And I use it myself live when I'm gigging is

I have a foot controller which is MIDI and then it changes all the different sounds in my guitar rec

So if I'm on sound one and it's nice and clean I hit and sound too

And I can play a solo or whatever and it will change all the equipment and change which setting they're all on it

And that's called a patch

It's a very easy way to

Just hit a pedal with your foot and have all your sounds change at the same time

And that's also true for keyboard players

You know they'd be playing on a piano sound and then get a patch too

and it suddenly becomes an organ and it might fire off patch changes and other people in other pieces of equipment and

That's a just a good example of a control signal. That's sent by MIDI

He'll give you a demo of how a certain bit of MIDI works

We're just going to record something into the computer, so this is Cubase this is

Version 8. Which is far advanced to the version that would have been on the Atari ST back in the early 80s but?

Fundamentally it does exactly the same thing rather than using the dx7

Sounds I'm going to use a very dated sail

That's built into Cubase so this is controlling the computer

So you can see if I play the notes on the keyboard they light up on the side here

Let's say I'd played a note wrong heaven forbid I did that so

Okay, so I've got the notes wrong there

and I hit a little fumbled bit at the end and I could double click on this and go oh, there's a

Fumbled note there, so I'm getting rid of that

And I can move these notes to where they should be and then I could play that back, and it should be fixed

Which still sounds bad, but is her infinitely better than it was before when it was on the wrong note, so

You can see the data is getting in and the data is being stored in the computer as

Messages of note on a note off and the color here and represented with these bars at the bottom as well

represent the volume

I played the note on the technical side so obviously we're seeing a bit of kind of user end data here

What does a message look like right well we can get into that that's funny. You say that the reason I?

When I first started using MIDI I was maybe about 13 or 14, it's gone

I was entirely from the user end and then through my career working in the studio

I was using entirely a user end and I didn't really think about how it works

I just thought about the channels and the messages I kind of knew what they meant

but I didn't really care about that too much, and then something came up where I was writing a

video server application that needed to sync up with timecode

so I had to write a timecode reader and

in the process of doing that I actually had to start intercepting MIDI messages and

Looking into what they actually contained

So I've modified that time code reader program that I wrote

So we can actually capture into a text file what's going on, so if I just play a note and then

I let you go

so we should now just have one note on one off so if I like this MIDI output dot txt and

We can see I played note 72 with a volume of

91 they're not actually 72 or

see one of that is in hexadecimal so

Whatever they are in in decimal that's what I played and

We got a note on signal there and another note on signal there 0 which is denoting that it's a note off

Ignore the rest of it. This is actually what's called the midi clock, so it's telling me

What the the number of the messages of C messages come in and you want to make sure that the message that comes in is?

After the previous one and such so that's that's what that is there the zero is the channel

That it's on which means it's actually on channel one

Because I'll see 0 is channel 1 and 15 is channel 16

Just to confuse everyone so we can capture some other things as well, so if I play a note again

and then do the modulation wheel and

Then back down again, and then let go the note

You can now see I've got a new note on message there, and then a load of control change information

which is

Increasing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 it starts skipping it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it reaches the top

It goes back down the other side back down to 0 again

So that is literally the recording of me pushing up the modulation wheel and bringing it back down again

And that just makes it this is a technical term sound Wibbly

Well the modulation wheel will do whatever the sound module is is set there's also a

Pitch shift wheel which will make these you

Know you go up and down in pitch or whatever so

There's all these different controls

There's panning so you can get things to go from left to right in the speakers and all of those things will be

recorded by your MIDI sequencer and then reproduced ok

And then you were mentioned before about kind of controlling and synchronizing things that to meet a really good example