i am new to midi please answer this......

[Tyler22]

what exactly is midi???i know it is a better way to record than just using your mic and line in inputs but what does it do different??

i just bought a digitech vx400 vocal proccessor pedal for my home recording studio and it goes throguh usb port......which it says is midi.

i am using cubase 2.0 sx and i want to record everything through my pedal.

does anyone know how i would set up cubase 2.0 sx to work with my pedal to record??

i installed the drivers and pro tracks(which came with the pedal) and everything works fine on that program......but i cannot get anything to record on my cubase program.....i have the manuals for both the program and the pedal but i cant find anywhere how to set it up.............thanks alot

 

[Rock Star 87]

i can't answer the pedal question, but i can explain MIDI pretty much in depth. first off, MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It was developed in the 90's as a "universal language" for instruments. It used to be blips and bleeps, but it's obviously develped a lot. Now you can use 128 standard instruments and 46 drum sounds. with programs like pro audio and sonar, you can do things such as transpose a part, or pretty much anything else that you can do with instrumental and percussion music. not only is it a tool for modern producers like the Neptunes and many hip-hop producers to make music quickly and easily, but composers can get a rough idea of what a piece sounds like b4 they put it in front of a live orchestra. now MIDI can communicate with pretty much any medium to high-end keyboard and/or electronic drumset. it is very conveinent way to make music, or preview a piece. mess around a little bit, i'm sure you'll find out how great it is, or at least why it's an industry standard.

 

[AlChuck]

Rock Star, I think you should hold off on the replies until you know a bit more about what you are talking about.

It was developed in the 90's as a "universal language" for instruments.

Wrong. It was developed in the 80's as a language for communicating musical events (note on, note value, volume, etc.) and control information (which patch or bank, which channel, etc.) between electronic musical instruments and other related devices like effects boxes, etc.

It used to be blips and bleeps, but it's obviously develped a lot. Now you can use 128 standard instruments and 46 drum sounds.

It was never "blips and bleeps." There is no sound inherent in it at all; it's merely a way of telling different devices that you have triggered a certain note, how hard you hit it, how long you held it down, etc. The sound-generating device that recieves this messsage responds by playing the note it was told with the parameters it was sent. There's no sound at all until a MIDI instrument that can make sounds resonds to MIDI messages routed to it that tell it to do so.

You could always use 128 instrument sounds, or more properly, there are 128 possible program change messages for a single MIDI port - but there are only 16 MIDI channels and only one sound can be assigned to a channel. So there are really only 16 separate notes you can have at any given time with a single MIDI port -- and at most it's possible to get one different sound per channel.

with programs like pro audio and sonar, you can do things such as transpose a part, or pretty much anything else that you can do with instrumental and percussion music.

You make it sound like MIDI allows you to do something you could already do with digital audio. The only way to really do it with audio is to transpose the parts, play them over, and record the new performance. Transposing MIDI information is trivial, as is speeding it up or changing which instrument is playing which part -- which is at least 50% or more of what's so powerful and cool about it.

 

[James Argo]

what exactly is midi???i know it is a better way to record than just using your mic and line in inputs but what does it do different??

MIDI= Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It's a language/protocol that alowed musical instrument (and devices like computer which can "talk" this language) to communicate each other. It's not audio data. It just contains command to control slaved devices. It doesn't have to be the better way to record your music, because it's just different way of recording in natural.

i just bought a digitech vx400 vocal proccessor pedal for my home recording studio and it goes throguh usb port......which it says is midi.

Your vx400 works like external soundcard. You can record your voice to PC if you connect it using USB. Thus it works as audio interface. Audio interface delivers your voices to PC, as audio, not MIDI.

i am using cubase 2.0 sx and i want to record everything through my pedal.

does anyone know how i would set up cubase 2.0 sx to work with my pedal to record??

I don't use Cubase. But generaly, you'll connect your vx400 thru USB. Windows will detect it and most likely asking you for it's driver. Install the driver. Once it's installed, it will appear on Cubase's audio I/O configuration. Select it. Tweak their setting as necessary, and you're ready to record your voices to PC thru vx400

i installed the drivers and pro tracks(which came with the pedal) and everything works fine on that program......but i cannot get anything to record on my cubase program.....i have the manuals for both the program and the pedal but i cant find anywhere how to set it up.............thanks alot

As I mentioned above. You need to configure Cubase and select vx400 as your audio interface.


Jaymz

 

[Tyler22]

hey thanks alot i will try that..............thank you again!!!

 

[tedluk]

Rock Star, I think you should hold off on the replies until you know a bit more about what you are talking about.

You could always use 128 instrument sounds, or more properly, there are 128 possible program change messages for a single MIDI port - but there are only 16 MIDI channels and only one sound can be assigned to a channel. So there are really only 16 separate notes you can have at any given time with a single MIDI port -- and at most it's possible to get one different sound per channel.

You were doing great up until this bit...

You can most certainly access more than 128 programs through MIDI. What you say was true until CC00 (Program Bank) and CC32 (LSB for Bank Select)were added (or more properly, defined). These CC (control change) messages allow synths with many more than 128 programs to work together and with computer applications.

A multitimbral synth can play more than one sound on a given MIDI channel at the same time. All sounds on that channel will follow the same MIDI data, but you can play more than one sound.

You can play as many different notes at one time as your synth has polyphony. The maximum polyphony on any single channel is going to be divided among the different sounds assigned to that channel and among all the channels that synth has been assigned to. In other words, if your synth is capable of 128 note polyphony and you have 8 different sounds (timbres) assigned to 8 different channels then you would have 16 notes of polyphony available on EACH channel. However, if you only assign one sound to one channel then you would have all 128 notes available on that channel.

I know this is confusing and I gave a VERY simplified example of how polyphony can be divided between different sounds on a given module. Some manufacturers use different schemes for drum programs and keep them separate from the instrument sounds when defining the polyphony of their units. Also, in a lot of instruments, doubling of notes to "thicken" a sound can reduce polyphony. Adding to the confusion, each manufacturer uses their own "language" to describe their products so that words like "programs", "voices", "multis", "performances", "timbres", "parts", "partials", "patches", "sounds", etc. take on different meanings. What Korg calls a "multi", Novation calls a "performance". They both are talking about a situation where you have several "programs" (a configuration of oscillators or samples, filters, amplifiers, etc.) organized into an arrangement of different channels, zones and layers across your controller.

As you can see, MIDI can be very complicated, but it can also simplify the process of creating music and you can manipulate MIDI in ways that would be difficult or impossible with the same audio data. Wide transpositions of pitch are very simple with MIDI whereas they are almost impossible with audio. Do you want to change every C to a C#? Nothing to it!

Also, MIDI files are MUCH smaller than the audio file of the same performance would be since they don't actually contain the audio data itself, only the instructions on how to perform it. The problem with this is that you don't have any control over how your MIDI files will sound on a different system. This is why the GM (General MIDI) spec was introduced- to minimize the variations between different systems. Now, a GM compatible file will sound more or less the same on all GM compatible instruments.

Manufacturers continue to advance the MIDI spec though there haven't been that many official enhancements over the 20 years MIDI has been around.

If you want to learn more about MIDI, go HERE

Good luck!

Ted

 

[AlChuck]

Wow, nailed! I sure blew that. Serves me right for making such a snotty comment to Rock Star, only to say something off-base my self.

Right, of course, you can have as many notes at once as the polyphony of your synth allows. What I really meant to say is that you can only address 16 MIDI channels with a single MIDI port, so you can only play up to 16 patches at any given time, but each port could have lots of note on messages going out at once and, depending on what's receiving the messages, all could be played...

I guess 128 notes is pretty de regieur these days... I remember when I borrowed an older synth in the early 90's to mess with and I think it could play four notes simutaneously...

 

[tedluk]

Wow, nailed! I sure blew that. Serves me right for making such a snotty comment to Rock Star, only to say something off-base my self.

That's why I didn't say anything too snotty to you...because I KNOW someone is going to find mistakes in what I said and nail ME!

Yeah, I've been there with MIDI from before the beginning. It's amazing how robust it has turned out to be and how much manufaturers have been able to get it to do without a major update in over 20 years!

Ted