MIDI Notation

[SilverCarvin]

I was looking through some tutorial videos on MIDI and they all import it by playing along to the project in real time, just like you'd overdub an audio track. I'm looking into a keyboard which is MIDI compatible and has a whole bunch of presets like percussion, strings, etc. which I would like to add to my songs. However, is having "live" keyboard skills the only way to record them? Like if I wanted a nice piano part, do I have to woodshed until I can play it, or will writing it out in a notation program and playing it back in the software work?

Let's say I wanted to record a drum part that runs throughout the song. Do you simply set the keyboard to a drum preset, use MIDI notation to assign the notes which, when played back, will be the drum sounds on the keyboard? Do you generally loop a standard durm riff for a bunch of bars and manually enter the fills, or do you have to write it all out in notation manually for whatever the duration of the song?

I've never used this stuff before, sorry if this has been answered a million times. Do I have the general idea right? It seems as though a lot of this stuff is trial and error to one degree or another....

Thanks,
Matt

 

[tedluk]

Matt-

There are different ways to work with MIDI and what methods you can use to input it vary with the device and software you are using.

Some devices support step entry, which allows you to define each event in a performance. This can be done on a grid or through an event list. Entering data in this manner can be tedious, but allows you complete control over every nuance. Sometimes this can be a bad thing as you can spend countless hours tweaking every note duration and velocity only to find that the performance has lost all sense of feeling. Another approach is to play things in real time, slow it way down if you need to, and then go back afterward and edit things until they sound the way you want them to.

To answer your more specific questions about how you would go about recording a drum part is difficult because it's going to vary depending on the software program or keyboard sequencer you're using.

Just remember that MIDI is NOT audio. It is a series of messages that describe the elements of a performance, not the performance itself. Because of this, MIDI allows you a great deal of flexibility that can't be easily achieved with audio. Audio has its own set of advantages and you will probably discover that you're going to use a combination of both.

I hope this helps somewhat.

Ted