Recording - November 2010 - 48

MIDI is nearly 30 years old, but it’s still a powerful way to have your computer work with your keyboards and sound modules. Here’s how.

How Your DAW Controls Your Studio By Devon Brent VIA MIDI
Not everything you do in your studio has to happen inside your DAW. There are many perfectly good and useful sound generators and effects processors that come in their own boxes—with and without keyboards attached—and integrating them into your projects via your DAW isn’t always easy, but is always possible. As long as such devices have MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and you understand just what their individual MIDI capabilities are, your DAW will be able to let you take charge of their operation. There are three basic and distinct ways in which this can happen. One is via a generalized program that exchanges data with many MIDI devices. Another is a specialized program that was written to address just one specific MIDI device or instrument. The third is to use an intermediary box, a hardware control surface, that talks both to your DAW and to the devices you wish to control. MIDI has a variety of messages (often called commands because they cause some action to happen): Note On, Note Off, Control Change (“CC”), Pitch Bend, Monophonic and Polyphonic Aftertouch, Program Change, and System Exclusive (“SysEx”) data. All those message types except SysEx messages can be common to all MIDI-capable devices, but manufacturers can choose how to implement these MIDI standards—not too many keyboards have polyphonic aftertouch, for example. What a manufacturer chose to use or leave out is documented in each instrument’s or device’s MIDI Implementation Chart. The way devices respond to MIDI, and the way their internal sound architecture and sound memory is designed, varies from device to device. That’s where SysEx data comes in—it’s MIDI data that’s specific to just one device (exclusive to just one system). Typical

MIDI works like a charm when all participants cooperate. But with so many different implementations over the last three decades, and with old gear getting downright cranky with receiving loads of MIDI data, things may not always go as planned.

The power of MIDI MIDI goes back to the early ’80s and is still unique in the way an entire industry came to agree on one universal standard to replace individual and incompatible designs. Suddenly pretty much any brand keyboard could talk to any other, and soon rack modules and other types of gear joined in—someone with only two hands could “play” the sounds of a great many instruments simultaneously, sending Note On/Off and other such messages over MIDI cables. (That’s all MIDI does—transferring messages; a MIDI cable never carries audio.) The 5-pin DIN connector (DIN stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung—German Standards Institute) was chosen as the physical MIDI port (connector) format—in Europe it had always been the norm for hi-fi equipment, but in the US and in Japan it had not been much in use. Only three of the five pins are supposed to be active, so don’t take your European cousin’s DIN (also called “Tuchel” in Germany) cable and use it as a MIDI cable, or things may go haywire. Nowadays there are many devices that send and receive those same MIDI messages over USB or FireWire—same messages, different cabling.
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uses for SysEx data include the loading and saving of user-programmable patch data, synthesizer parameter settings, and updates to system firmware. Let’s agree, for the rest of this article, to call the kind of data that an instrument turns into sounds a patch. This could be a preset that forever is locked into the memory of an instrument, or it could be a user-programmed patch that can be erased, replaced, and shared with others. More about SysEx If someone offers you a great set of “sounds” for a synth in your studio, these “sounds” will be user-programmed patch data in the form of MIDI SysEx. Note that this is different from audio samples, even though both MIDI programs and audio samples are sets of digital data. Also note that, strictly speaking, a “sound” or “patch” or “program” for your synth isn’t really a “sound” but a set of data that the synth will then turn into an actual sound when you load it, select it, and play it. But how do you get those patch files from your DAW into your synthesizer? Physically, this will involve hooking up two MIDI cables between the MIDI In and Out ports on

Recording - November 2010

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