Midi

[Jimi]

I figured how to use Sampletank in my PT setup. Everything is on Channel 1 of the Midi. What are the other 15 for?

[Pretty Pretty Cyanide]

For using more than 1 VSTi's or hardware synths, or other parameters you can\want to configure.

Think of it as orchestrating 15 or more opera players.

[This message has been edited by Pretty Pretty Cyanide (edited 08-15-2003).]

[bubba freaktree]

that's the best question all summer!

seriously, it's wayyyyyyyy overkill these days. midi was created in 1983.

back then, everything was a one trick pony. one sound, one at a time. so you would have all these wires going around. to trigger "the string sound" from your Juno 106. "the electric piano sound" from you Dx-7.

so let's say you're playing your dx-7 in a flock of seagulls cover band. you want to send a signal to your tx-7 sound module (you were an "advanced" player, so you also had the rackmount dx-7) but you don't want to accidentally send the notes to your Juno-106, because you're saving those sounds for your surprise Duran Duran set later in the evening.

so you would assign different pieces of equipment different "channels". Keep the Juno 106 on channel 9, and it won't make a sound until you send a channel-9 signal its way.

then people started piling lots of synths around them. kind of like the prog-rockers of the 70's like Keith Emerson or Tony Banks. But the new guys couldn't play worth a terd, and their music sucked worse than their playing. But they were "advanced" players because they had purple hair and could trigger all sorts of keyboards and drum machine stuff by sending programmed signals through midi channels. The name "Yanni" comes to mind. He was/is a "romantic" player with a mustache and long *black* hair (because he was a "serious" music composer. not a frivolous trendy "pop musician").

You also didn't always have your own "recording studio" remember a 24 track machine would cost $30,000 and up, add $100,000 or more for a pro console, microphones, and you get the picture.

So you would "program" as much of your music as you could. Then you would carry your whole elephant load of equipment to the "Big Studio" and sync the tracks to tape using smpte time code. Then you would overdub the vocals and add your Steinberger electric guitar tracks, heavily-chorused of course.

This was done "Time after Time....Time after Time"

nowadays it's kind of bordering on stupidity to have 64 midi channels, unless you're some wacked-out film composer with an un-tamed midi addiction.

so it's a holdover from the 80's. 16 channels is plenty for today's, music production methods.

here's why you may need more than one channel:

put your keyboard controller on channel 1. then put your "knob master slider buddy" thing on channel 2. put your "virtual hardware" mixer on channel 3. that way you don't send the wrong signal at the wrong time to the wrong part of your setup.

another scenario: you have gigastudio on a second computer. the strings are on channel one, and the woodwinds are on channel 2. so if you want the strings to play a held-chord, it can do that, and then when the wandering woodwind line comes in, it wont' make the strings wander around with it, because the strings only respond to signals on channel one and the woodwinds are on channel 2.

my whole philosophy is to "play it and lay it". once i get a sound/part i like, i go straight to hard drive recording for the most part. the only downside to this is i can't "switch" the sound once it's recorded. if everything is still in midi land, you can just call up "string ensemble #8, if you felt string ensemble #7 kind of sucked after further listening. but it gets kind of crazy having things completely non-committed until mixdown.

there also is another slight advantage to having a multi-port midi interface. if you need to trigger a bunch of sounds at once, you can send them out on different physical wires, this can help tighten the timing, rather than having a massive note cluster on different channels all being sent down one midi cable pipeline. every note on a midi signal causes one millisecond of delay. having a multiport feed can deflect some of that built up delay.

but it doesn't sound like you're in danger of becoming a recreated version of a 1980's midi-addict, so don't sweat it.