MIDI FOR NEWB'S
in case you don't know, midi information does not contain sound. I did'nt know this when I first played around with midi. midi is only information.
heres the low down........your keyboard can send out information via midi out. so, you play a cool synth line on your keyboard. you want that information to be recorded, so you run a midi cable from the midi out of the keyboard to the midi in of the sound card and record that information to a midi track. what you are actually recording are things like what notes you play, the velocity at which you played them, pitch bends, etc. no actual sound is sent over a midi cable.
so you say, "that's pretty lame. I want the sound from my keyboard to be recorded to an audio track on my computer". in order for the internal sounds produced by your keyboard to be recorded, you have to send audio out of your keyboard via AUDIO outputs to the AUDIO inputs of your sound card and record it to an AUDIO track. if you only want the audio to be recorded, no need for midi at all. (stressing audio here).
what if you want recorded midi information from a midi track on your computer to trigger the internal sounds of your keyboard? hook up a cable from the midi out of your sound card to the midi in of your your keyboard. now when you press play in your recording software, midi info is sent from the playing midi track on your computer, which you recorded earlier, to your keyboard. the recorded midi track is triggering the intenal sounds of your keyboard, exactly the way you played that cool synth line when you recorded the midi track.
an advantage to midi is, you can record information rather than sound, which frees up alot of cpu usage and hard drive space compared to recording actual audio. for example, I can write a tune in Reason (a midi sequencer, software synthesizer, and software sampler all rolled into one) including drums, bass lines, synth lines, sound effects, etc. and store that midi song in as little space as 1 megabyte on my hard drive since only the midi information is being recorded. also, all these recorded midi tracks don't weigh heavy on my processor since the actual audio that is triggered by the midi information is usually just some small audio samples.
might as well cover midi thru while I'm at it. you have two keyboards with their own internal sounds. you want to use the drum sounds from the first keyboard and the bass sounds from the second keyboard. also, you don't want to record the "audio" from the keyboards just yet because you want to play around with the internal sounds of the keyboards to see if they sound good together. with midi thru, you can setup each keyboard on different midi channels (I think most keyboards have at least 16) and daisy chain the two keyboards using midi thru to the single midi input of your sound card.
you can do some cool stuff with midi and software these days. for example, my midi controller keyboard has sliders, knobs, and buttons which can be programmed to control functions in my recording software, soft synths, etc. so if I want to use the sliders on my keyboard to act as the volume faders in my recording software, I can do that........maybe use the knobs for tweaking eq, the buttons for record, playback, rewind. cool stuff. even cooler, I can record some audio tracks, setup a midi track to record my sliders, knobs, and button tweaks. now I can do volume swells on the fly, adjust the midrange of a guitar during a verse, lengthen a reverb tail at the end of a chorus.....and it's all recorded via midi as I do it. it's called automation. for those of us that have digital guitar amps, effects processors, etc., with midi interfaces, we can control our gear via midi software. say I'm recording a friend playing guitar through my Line6 Duoverb amp that is in the other room. I can tweak the knobs of the amp via midi from my computer.
for anyone that reads this, and is thinking about buying a midi keyboard or midi controller, here are some things to consider:
a midi controller can come in many forms these days. it can be in the form of a keyboard, a drum machine style box, a foot controller like you would use for a guitar effects processor, etc. the thing is, a stand alone midi controller does not contain any internal sound. there are'nt any drums, bass, synths, gongs, screaming chickens inside a midi controller. a midi controller is used for controlling keyboards with internal sounds, samplers, soft synths, effects processors, on and on........most of us newbs see a keyboard and assume it has internal sounds. this is'nt necessarily the case.
what we typically call a "keyboard" or a "synthesizer", is self contained, including it's own internal sounds which can be in the form of audio samples, synthesizers, general midi sounds, etc. but, this type can also be used as a stand alone midi controller without using any of its internal sounds.
sorry for such a long post but I hate to see so many newbies suffer through all this midi crap as I did......still do sometimes.
