MIDI IN

Last year, Autumn Altair published Echoes on Stone Walls . It is "is the soundtrack to a DOS game that doesn't exist". For a limited time it was available on floppy disc but even if you only buy the album digitally, you still get the .mid files as well as audio. I love the album, I love Skoddie's compositions - I like the way they play with time signatures and cross-rhythms, and the way they use all of the sounds/instruments available, particularly the percussion. I love the fact that it was published as MIDI. Using a notation editor to read the music while listening really does enhance your appreciation of the music. Making the tracks work with MIDISID wasn't straightforward. They weren't written with six voices in mind, so in some cases I've had to edit them down or at least make sure that the important parts are heard.  Some of the instruments play chords, eg harp and harpsichord. In some cases I've spread out those parts over multiple channels so t...

 Thanks to my partner finding these MIDI files , I've really enjoyed going through them and making them work with MIDISID. I've put all 9 levels on one video. (actually it's one short - one of the levels made an automatic copyright claim with an unrelated song!)  I've mixed them up so that if you only hear two levels, they're the two that I think work the best. Ideally, they'd just work with MIDISID exactly as downloaded, and level 1 does just that (after making a couple of improvements to the firmware.) Other levels involved a little tweaking. When MIDISID is released, I'll publish a proper tutorial, but in a nutshell, it's mostly about editing down the midi file if there are more things than the 6 voices can play. 

Updates The first new thing is this lovely face plate. I wasn't really keen on a clear panel but my partner lasercut some of these in different materials and I'm in love with this.   It's partly to make sure that everything lines up (it almost does!) and now I've ordered what I hope will be the final 'production' PCBs - in purple!  What is MIDI and how do you use it? The lovely 5-pin din below is like USB for musical instruments. In fact it is serial and nowadays things tend to do MIDI over USB or bluetooth. Some things like this DATEL MIDI cartridge for the C64 have 3 ports, midi in, out and through. Some devices just have in and out and some have one or the other. MIDI consists of just a few bytes telling you which notes to play when and on what instrument. Like sheet music. So .mid files are very small and have the charming feature that they sound different according to what you use to play the audio. That's where MIDISID's General MIDI mode comes in....

Last year, Autumn Altair published Echoes on Stone Walls . It is "is the soundtrack to a DOS game that doesn't exist". For a limited time it was available on floppy disc but even if you only buy the album digitally, you still get the .mid files as well as audio. I love the album and I love the fact that it was published as MIDI. Using a notation editor to read the music while listening really does enhance your appreciation of the music. As part of my work to implement the standard midi instruments into MIDISID and generally test its General MIDI mode, I've been trying various .mid tracks that I own, including some of the tracks from this album.  Here is, track 2, Jesterful Lambast, which I love so much. I have had to tinker with the midi a little*. Mostly I've had to add some sounds to MIDISID that I had not yet implemented. This track uses the snare rimshot or 'side stick' (percussion note 37), 'atmosphere' (program 100 from the FX group) and ...

This first video is about monophonic mode. I'll be talking about the modes a lot because MIDISID works in three very different ways and it'll be good to demo them as much as possible.  In this one I talk about the honky tonk and how we might reproduce that rustic sound. I've also been working on an annoying hum I've been experiencing since building the last revisions of the boards. Counterintuitively it seemed worse when on battery power (there's a clue). Today I've been cutting traces and adding bodge wires. Adding capacitors and generally messing around, trying to find out where the problem lies.  Here is the problem. The first half of this demonstrates the problem. You'll hear the chime of the SwinSID Nanos as I apply the power, and then you'll hear the hum before the music starts.  The second half is how things sounded after fixing the problem. The hum is undetectable and the sound level is better (these things are visually obvious too in the Sound S...