How To Record From Keyboard to PC

  • Thread starter Thread starter gravityprisoner
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Hi - thanks again everyone. Um, what are the sounds on the Extigy you mentioned, AlChuck? I've looked through the online manual and don't seem to find anything about them. Also, and this is a really unsophisicated question, but how exactly do you record with midi instruments if midi is only used for data transferral, not audio input? Wouldn't that make it hard to mix and edit if the audio is not available? Thanks!
 
Um, what are the sounds on the Extigy you mentioned, AlChuck? I've looked through the online manual and don't seem to find anything about them.
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Well, what do you know... as far as I can tell from the specs, the Extigy, unlike the Audigy, has no on-board MIDI synth. I was under the impression that it was just an external model of the Audigy. Sorry for my erroneous assumption (again!).

Also, and this is a really unsophisicated question, but how exactly do you record with midi instruments if midi is only used for data transferral, not audio input? Wouldn't that make it hard to mix and edit if the audio is not available?
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Think of it like a player piano -- those old pianos with the roll of punched paper, that triggered a mecahnism that played the appropriate keys on the piano at the right moments. MIDI is really just a modern-day version of that. It represents the performance data -- which notes, how hard they are hit, what moment they are hit, how long they are held down, and a variety of other things. This is immensely useful despite-- no, actually, because it doesn't carry the sound recorded. Once the audio has been recorded there's only a few things you can do with it. But with MIDI notes, you can edit them, make sheet music out of them, transpose them with a single click of the mouse, change whayt kind of instument is going to play the notes, etc. So you have a tremendous amount of editing power over the performance data, things that are impossible to do if you had an audio recording.

Of course before you can make a stereo master to distribute on CDs or over the radio, you have to capture an audio rendition of what the MIDI data represents. It's simply a matter of playing the recorded MIDI data through whatever MIDI instrument is used to play it, and captruing the audio produced by this device as it responds to the messages.
 
So...I can edit through the Extigy software, but in order to be able to hear what I've done I have to play it back through the keyboard? I hope it's not as complicated as it sounds. Thanks, all!
 
What you can edit is the MIDI messages -- what the pitches are, when they occur, how fast (the tempo) -- every detail that describes the music's performance. The changes you make in the MIDI sequence data are heard when you send the sequence to the receiving MIDI intrument -- in your case, your keyboard.

It is not complicated at all, really -- once you "get it" it will make perfect sense. If it was rocket science it would never have caught on and been so widely used by musicians, trust me.

Think of it like this -- everything that makes a sound, does so in response to some sort of action -- a drum skin vibrates when you hit it with the stick, a guitar string when you pluck it, a flute when you blow into it. The hitting/plucking/blowing actions and the timing and combination of how you do all that is the performance data, if you will. It causes the sound to exist, but the actions themselves are not part of the sound itself. This is essentially the difference between the MIDI data being transmitted to the MIDI instrument and the sound that issues forth from the speakers when the MIDI instument listens to those messages and does what they tell it to do.
 
Thanks so much! I'll keep you updated on my progress (or lack thereof) - :)
 
Alchuck, I've never really understood what midi was about, but thanks to you, it's beginning to make some sense to me. Your explanations are the best I've heard. I thank you.
 
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