#MIDISID Sunday 17 July 2022

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.

I like using a desktop midi player, or a DAW, like Logic Pro. Anything worth its salt will be able to route the MIDI to wherever you choose.  


If you use a computer you can use one of these ^ to connect to MIDI devices. In fact I also use this when I'm playing my Roland piano which connects to my computer over bluetooth. I can just pass that through to this MIDI out plug. The same goes for my re.corder MIDI controller. 

General MIDI mode on MIDISID will do its best to render a .mid file within the limitations it has. 

Examples of MIDISID in use and recent improvements

While working on this I've been using some Wintergatan tunes which sound beautiful, and recently, Echoes on Stone Walls by Autumn Altair, a very recent album released in midi format. As I try those, I always find instruments within them that I need to add or work on within MIDISID.

In particular this week I've been improving some of the drum sounds and filling in some of the gaps. We now have the common kit sounds filled in, and some of the uncommon ones. 

I've now added filter sweep, which has improved sounds like the toms, but my favourite new sound this week is the  vibraslap!

The video contains clips of the tunes I mentioned, and examples of the current drum sounds and that vibraslap. 

Here's the link to the Autumn Altair album on Bandcamp. If you buy it you get the audio and the .mid for all of the tracks.  The more you listen to it, the better it gets!


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