07 MIDI Basics O.K quick history lesson - get a strong coffee so you don't fall asleep.
"I started off writing songs and playing keyboards. I'd play guitar and percussion and learnt instruments like that."
Adam F
When synthesisers were first invented they were unable to communicate with any other piece of studio gear.
Although they were a real advancement, you had to play them in 'live' because they were not able to be sequenced and the more synth sounds you required the more synths you needed.
A common language was needed and in the same way that the internet linked up the worlds computers, MIDI is the language that has linked up all the parts of the studio.
The introduction of MIDI created a lot of advantages.
It meant you could use the keys of one synth to control the sounds of another.
That meant you could have a big rack of keyboards but only one of them needed to be in the ideal playing position - the rest you could put wherever you liked and control them remotely using MIDI .
That's why most studios have one keyboard - sometimes called a MIDI controller.
You can buy sound generating modules without keyboards - usually known as synth modules - and control them all from one master keyboard.
This made sound modules a lot smaller and also cheaper because they didn't need loads of keys.
You can record MIDI into a device called a sequencer.
It will register every key press and release, together with how hard you pressed the key and can also record any changes in the sound that you make as you play, like pitch bend and modulation.
The sequencer records the MIDI information that a synth module needs to re-create the performance.
This means you can record a solo using a piano sound and then try playing it back using different sounds to fit the feel of the track.
You can also edit the performance in a way that's not easy or almost impossible to do if you tried to play it in 'live'.
Bad notes can be corrected and you can use a process called quantising which can arrange every note to an exact time.
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