Recording - August 2013 - 59

The first MIDI sequencer, the ancestor of our modern DAW software, was MIDI/4 by Passport Designs. This
basic 4-track MIDI sequencer, in which notes were entered from the computer keyboard as text, was sold
with a simple MIDI interface for the Commodore 64 computer. A companion product, MIDI/2, was available
for the Apple II. (Yes, the platform wars were already in place even then!)

It took a while for some
folks to grasp that recorded
MIDI data wasn’t recorded
sound, it was data that
could lead to the generation
of sounds, just like notes on
music paper need an interpreter, a player, before they
become sounds. This led to
other uses for MIDI, like programs that turned performances into printable music notation, the ancestors of Finale and Sibelius.

Another standard has evolved, OSC (Open Sound Control), that overlaps,
in part, the capabilities of MIDI. When you look at the websites listed on the
previous page, be prepared to disregard the not always productive backand-forth claims about which protocol, MIDI or OSC, can or cannot achieve
what goals. There is motion forward and evolution of new standards, to be
sure, but for the majority of recording musicians, MIDI continues to do everything we need and then some, from recording our performance data to
automating our virtual instruments and recorded tracks.
The future is always a mystery until we get there and we can’t know
now what we’ll be using years from now. But meanwhile—Happy
Birthday, dear MIDI, we still need and appreciate what you can do for
us recording musicians!
The Editors would like to thank Scott Robertson for the photos and PR
material that appears in this article.
For the 30th Anniversary Exhibition, a remarkably clear demonstration of MIDI’s
timelessness was set up for showgoers to enjoy. In this rig, one of the very earliest MIDI note-generating devices to come into popular use, a Commodore 64
computer with a Sequential Circuits Model 64 MIDI interface plugged into its
expansion port, is sending a sequence of notes to an Apple iPad with an IK
Multimedia iRig MIDI interface, running the Moog Animoog virtual instrument
app. (The Roland sound module sitting atop the computer monitor is not connected to the setup.)
Despite the fact that the device sending MIDI was built nearly 30 years ago
and is ancient by any computer-tech measurement and the device receiving
MIDI is brand-new, the sequence plays back perfectly... because MIDI, the language underneath it all, remains stable and understandable by all devices
designed to work with it, then and now.

Knowing what you know about today’s music production, where all the above is ho-hum and taken for
granted, can you even grasp how amazing this once
was? You had to be there...
But even more amazing was the fact that MIDI even
came about the way it did. Can you imagine people
from individual companies, both in the US and in Japan
(and soon worldwide), coming together on such a new
standard, when these individual companies had
already begun to develop their own similar technologies? For some major companies, accepting MIDI as the
new universal standard meant ditching their own projects, and that’s not something companies readily do.
Roland and Yamaha are among those who deserve
the most credit for putting the competitive spirit aside
and collaborating on MIDI. Here in the US, in Los
Angeles, a musician with considerable organizational
skills, Jeffrey Rona, was tasked with the stewardship of
the MIDI Manufacturers Association, to introduce MIDI
to the world at large. Read his account of those heady
days at http://jeffrona.com/2013/01/midi-from-theinside, and then read the facsimile of the first invitation
to the industry to come hear about MIDI, at a summer
NAMM show in New Orleans in 1983. A former layout artist of this magazine, Lachlan “Lucky” Westfall,
deserves credit for assisting Rona in those days and for
heading up the IMA (International MIDI Association)
that brought MIDI closer to the individual musicians.
Nowadays, MIDI is no longer restricted to the 5-pin DIN
connectors (fatherly reminder that only three pins should be
active...) of original MIDI cables. MIDI data moves over pretty much any digital transport medium you care to use, and
it has evolved in its applications in ways that could not be
foreseen 30 years ago. Most of our readers use USB cables
to send MIDI from control devices to their DAWs, and many
won’t even know what a 5-pin DIN cable looks like!

http://www.jeffrona.com/2013/01/midi-from-the-inside http://www.jeffrona.com/2013/01/midi-from-the-inside http://www.eartrumpetlabs.com http://www.eartrumpetlabs.com

Recording - August 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2013