Description Of Midi-Mag

And Intro To Midi

The original concept of midi-mag was an audio cassette magazine put together for blind people by blind musicians. There were two issues of the audio magazines sent out back in the spring and summer of 1995. I am not sure wheather there will be any future issues or not. The group of people that started the endeavour were able to communicate over email so a mailing list was set up .at or about the same time.

This mailing list has become quite popular for folks helping each other to learn and trouble-shoot midi problems in general. Actually, it is a direct descendent of the magazine and it's contents are determined by the subscribers.

What's MIDI

 MIDI is the Music Industries Digital Interface. In English it's a standard which specifies how different musical instruments should learn to get a long in an otherwise unfriendly electronic world. It has become a popular standard over the years mostly because it was put together by the manufacturers of musical equipment. It allows one to connect music-keyboards and drum machines and computers together by cables and have them pass musical information back and forth, so you can play a piece, or part of a piece on one keyboard and have it come out on another device like a drum machine. Hook a computer in to this mess of connected wires and you have quite a bit of power because you can record your compositions, or play pieces by someone else on your synthesizer. You can even edit those compositions or even make entirely new sounds and then perform them in concert.

What do I need to get started?

The minimum needed is a couple of musical instruments which support the MIDI standard and an appropriately wired cable to connect them together. For the truly demented this is hardly enough. The basic set-up would be a computer with a sound card, and at least one MIDI capable keyboard. Of course having that appropriately wired cable mentioned earlier is helpful as well. From here the sky is the limit. Most people have a number of keyboards or synthesizer modules and drum machines and I guess money would be the final limiting factor.

Keyboards, drum machines, synthesizers, modules, what you talking about boy! You think you're confused, if I can just get through this next bit I think it will be all downhill from there. A lot of the terms above are somewhat synonymous. A synthesizer is an electronic device which imitates commonly heard musical and not so musical sounds. It synthesizes those sounds. I won't go into the details now because there are many different types of musical synthesis. If a synthesizer has a musical keyboard like a piano built-in, it is sometimes known as just a keyboard. If it does not have a keyboard it is typically called a module. Clear! That's what you think. some keyboards do not have synthesizers as part of their character at all! They are called controllers or keyboard controllers. They are capable of driving many synths at one time. Their main claim to fame is that they usually have fairly realistic feeling keys. If you consider a piano as the ultimate feel in keyboards.

Hey! What about the computer?

Oh yeah, the computer. Well most blind folks use PC-compatibles so that's what I will limit my discussion to here. As you probably already know a personal computer is made up of a number of actual components. The screen, the keyboard, the C.P.U. which is actually the entire computer. Inside the computer itself there are also a number of components which comprise different subsections of the PC. One of these subsystems is call the bus. There are a few different types of busses available in personal computers, such as an I.S.A. bus or a P.C.I. bus. Don't worry about how they actually work it is not really important to our discussion. The one thing to remember is you cannot mix and match by placing a P.C.I. board into a I.S.A. bus. The boards are individual components like modems, video cards and so forth. There are two types of boards or cards which we are interested in, the sound card and the MIDI interface. On the most popular sound card on the market today the Sound Blaster, the MIDI interface is built right onto the card as well so you won't need two different cards. Well usually. The rest of what you'll need is software and there are plenty of different programs available.

So! what is a sound card? Well sound cards come in many flavours but as I mentioned above the Sound Blaster is the most common so I'll keep my discussion limited to it. On the Sound Blaster there are five basic subsystems which interest us. The D-toA and A-toD converters, the MIDI port, the built-in synthesizer and the effects/mixer. The D-toA and A-toD converters are used when the card is either recording or playing sounds. For instance when your Windows package is beeping and bopping it is playing sound files through the D-to-A converter. We'll get into more depth on these converters on subsequent pages. The MIDI port is actually a combination of a number of ports which you separate by getting a special cable from CreativeLabs (maker of the Sound Blaster). This cable consists of a 15-pin joystick male connector on one end and Y's into three plugs at the other end, a joystick femaile connector and MIDI-in and MIDI-out din connectors. A din connector is a small round cylinderical shell with five or six pins inside of the shell. The on board synth depends a bit on which of the many versions of the Sound Blaster you have, but it is generally one of the FM synthesizers by Yamaha. The page on synthesis will go into more detail on FM synthesis. The last subsystem is the effects/mixer which are actually separate from each other but in this simple outline I'll clump them together. The mixer allows you to control the outputs and inputs from all of the sound devices in a modern PC-compatible like the cd-rom, the mic, the PC speaker and the D-toA/A-toD converters. You can route these devices through various effects to get echo, reverb, chorus and the like. The number of effects you can get also depends on the version of the Sound Blaster you have. If you use a different sound card and/or a separate MIDI interface card the basic subsystems are pretty much the same; the difference is in where they are and how they're controlled. There is much much more to cover on this section of the system. From a hardware point-of-view, in my opinion this is the pivotal part of the overall set-up. The quality of the digitized signals, the audio quality and the completeness of the MIDI implementation are all dependent on the sound system/cards used.