01-MIDI


 * What is MIDI**

You may have heard of MIDI before, but perhaps you are not exactly sure of what it is, what it does or what it can do. At its most basic, MIDI is a digital message. This message triggers synthesized or sampled sounds in order to help you create music. It is important to understand that //MIDI is not the sound itself//. Instead, MIDI is the set of instructions that produces the sound i.e. when a note begins playing, how long it plays for and how loud the note should be played. This is what gives MIDI its versatility, simplicity and wide ranging appeal.

With MIDI, a song can be viewed as a sequence of notes. Once you have a sequence of MIDI commands stored as a song file, and because it is just that, a set of commands, you can bend these commands to your will. Using a computer program called a sequencer you can alter your song note by note, section by section. You can make a note louder or softer, longer or shorter or even make an entirely different instrument play a particuler note, melody or entire section. Sequencers have become more user friendly over the years and simply clicking and dragging with a mouse will let you manipulate your original composition until you have it just as you had envisaged, or as close as possible!

The simplest way to create a song (or score) using MIDI is to use a MIDI controller such as a keyboard.
 * How does MIDI work? **

//Fig 1 A MIDI Controller/Synthesizer//

At it’s simplest, there are four things to be considered when you play a note on a keyboard; that a key has been pressed, which key has been pressed, how hard the key has been pressed and the key is no longer pressed. When it has been broken down in this way it is easy to see how such events can be recorded digitally as messages and either stored in a file on a computer or sent to a device called a synthesizer and played as music.