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Middle C, the C written below the treble clef and above the bass clef, has MIDI note 60. Conventionally, this note is referred to as C4. However, Yamaha refers to MIDI note 60 (middle C) as C3. Another major music equipment company, Roland, refers to this note as C4, as is conventional.
Therefore, the first note in your first diagram is B4 in “Roland pitch”...
13
Musescore is free as opposed to many other programs such as Sibelius or Finale. However, it is still very good and can do almost everything that paid programs can do.
One of the input files accepted in Musescore is MIDI and it can output PDF among other formats. However, as guidot said, it takes a human to do it right because a MIDI file does not contain ...
13
You can go microtonal using MIDI! You don't need an extension. The question is: does your instrument/device (hardware or software) allows it?
MIDI can handle microtonality from the control surface to the program interpreting it.
One example of MIDI allowing microtonality in the interpreting side is Native Instrument's Absynth. You can set the instrument ...
12
General Midi specifies a mapping.
Roland's GS standard adds to it as does Yamaha's XG standard.
Your exact keyboard (and possibly drum preset itself) may vary.
see http://pianocheetah.com/midi/drum.html and wikipedia:
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I've used this before and I know there is a ton of documentation for this program.
If you scan the documentation you can find out what the results of each event means. This is directly from the documentation:
Track, Time, Note_on_c, Channel, Note, Velocity
Send a command to play
the specified Note (Middle C is defined as Note number 60; all ...
12
This has been a raging debate for the past 30 years or so. There has been a healthy competition between the two platforms in an effort to corner a large segment of the market share.
In the beginning, Macs targeted the creative artsy types and the platform had features and benefits specifically geared to favor musicians and photographers and graphic ...
11
MIDI is not sound. The MIDI specification does not dictate what any instrument sounds like, it's up to the synthesizer to generate the sound. Free synths sound like crap, but good ones can sound as good as the creators can make them. For example, the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack is entirely synthesized, yet most people don't even realize it.
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I think that you probably mean "whinnying" of a horse.
With brass instruments, it's typically done with a valved instrument, such as a trumpet or a tuba (or valve trombone if you have one.) The sound is typically produced by pressing the valves halfway down and either shaking the instrument (in the case of a trumpet) or by making a very wide vibrato. ...
9
Yes, there are electronic drums.
There will be a tapping sound when playing. This will likely not disturb your neighbors, but your room mate might find it disturbing.
I believe that playing with brushes is problematic, but I'm not updated on the technical advancements of electronic drums.
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Microtonal is tricky on MIDI because it separates the space between half-tones into 128 equal notes. I'm surprised any normal MIDI player won't integrate pitch bend as a microtonal parameter - is that how you are doing it?
I've been trying to work on a continuous pitch controller in MIDI. the issue is that depending on the MIDI player, the 0-128 can send ...
8
As per the previous answers, there are electronic kits that are effectively silent, insofar as you only get the sound of a stick striking a rubber pad or, in the cases of some e-kits, mesh heads.
However, I'm an acoustic drummer and I've found playing on electronic kits to be problematic: they're invariably fixed to a frame, so you can be limited in where ...
8
Seems that you are new to the whole synthesis thing and you are looking for specific sounds found in other songs, so I recommend you to start with a software synthesizer that has a big and good library and macro support/dynamics.
The library will let you choose from an array of well-organized pre-programmed sounds, and the macros will let you tweak those ...
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MIDI is only a specification for what instrument (patch) to use, what notes to play, how long and loud to play a note and other things like tempo, time signature and text lyrics. The concept is very similar to how an old player piano works. The midi data is like the piano roll, the sound you hear is from the physical sound produced when the hammers strike ...
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(I'm asking about something like this segment: 3/4 ^G,3/4 [^D3^D,3/2]
=G,3/2 [c/4C,/4] C/4 [d3/8^A,/8] G; taken straight from A Little Fight Mewsic by Homestuck)
You seem to be confused about what MIDI is. I'm not sure where you got that, but the above clip is emphatically not MIDI. MIDI is a binary format, and as such, is not really human readable. Here, ...
8
MIDI (SMF) files specify a PPQ (ticks per quarter note) value, which is used as the base for all timestamps.
Many programs use a value of 96 or 192 by default. The specification allows much larger values (up to 32767), but many programs do not bother to make this configurable.
Another way of getting faster timing would be to use 1/128th notes, but with ...
7
What I do for critical recordings: I simply don't use virtual instruments running on the computer, but split the MIDI signal, route only one path to the interface and the other to a cheap general-MIDI sound module. This sounds horrible, but has neglectable latency so I can well use it for monitoring and get an as-clean-as-possible MIDI track. Once that's ...
7
With my MIDI sequencer, you figure that out on your own. You drag rectangles around the hand's notes that are the easiest to pick out, and that'll move them to that other hand's track.
So, manually, you:
Figure out if the piece is even playable by a human - sometimes it's for a computer to play (a bunch of hugely complex, blisteringly fast arpeggios a ...
7
The file is a list of 128 integers -- each of which is the frequency of the corresponding midi note in miliHertz. The first line gives the frequency for midi note 0, the next for midi note 1 and so on.
For A440, 12-tone equal temperament, lines 65-72 (inclusive) would be:
--lines 1-64 (midi notes 0-63) snipped >>
# next is midi 64
329628
349228
369994
...
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Yes it is possible.
Using your Mac
If you want your Mac to be part of the system, you'll need to leave your Mac on running the software that is producing the sounds at all times, but that doesn't seem to match a "simple always-on piano".
Samplers need a lot of resources, and having one on your system 100% of the time might be impractical.
If you ...
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That's pretty common. My synth does that, too.
Overlapping notes is a grey area in midi.
But most synths do perform an implicit noteoff when a noteon comes along on that channel.
If you want it to stay on, put them on seperate channels.
That'll usually do the trick.
Midi is primarily meant for piano. And you find lots of notation
that shows a chord ...
7
MIDI is just a stream of instructions, like:
"Tell channel 1 to turn on note 60"
"Tell channel 2 to turn off note 72"
"Tell channel 3 to set parameter 1 to value 231"
There is a set of conventions such as:
Channel 1 is piano, 34 is electric bass, etc.
Parameter 1 is modulation, 7 is volume, 64 is sustain, etc.
This is called General MIDI (Wikipedia).
...
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It won't go out the midi port to your keyboard, but the midi sequencer programs that display notation need it if they're going to show the music in standard notation. It's also helpful if you're a composer and want to know what the key is. Without it, a C4 might be the I, or might be the fifth or somewhere else in the key. You could generally guess based ...
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One thing that no one has mentioned yet (I think) is the audio driver.
On Windows, to get multiple audio drivers you either need to use the windows driver, which in general doesn't work very well with DAWs, has more latency and limited multi-device options, or use ASIO4ALL which allows you to combine the inputs into one device and work with low-latency, at ...
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Firstly, does your USB keyboard have MIDI out (DIN) sockets as well...
...or is it USB only?
If it is USB only, then it is possible to get a hardware converter (from USB to traditional 'DIN' MIDI) that should work as long as the USB Midi keyboard is 'class compliant'. an example is http://www.kentonuk.com/products/items/utilities/usb-host.shtml.
Once you ...
7
People did use DAWs in the 90s, but in the early to mid 90s, the few DAWs that existed were generally only used by professionals. That is because the processing power of computers was not enough to handle the digital signal processing that even a basic DAW needs, and hard drive systems were not fast enough to stream audio in real time, so DAW systems ...
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If you're on Windows, it's almost certainly not a hardware problem. The situation is caused by the audio output going through the Windows mixer before going to the sound card. That adds a significant delay.
Look in your audio application settings for ASIO or WASAPI output. If ASIO, you need to download ASIO4ALL. This will let your program bypass the Windows ...
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