MIDI and Songwriting: How it Works, What You Need To Know

Photo by Loui Loui

Today’s computer recording technology provides songwriters with the tools necessary to achieve beautifully textured arrangements. One major tool in the songwriter-producer’s arsenal is MIDI. While it provides loads of instrumentation options and editing capabilities, MIDI can also be a perfectionist’s nightmare, causing endless tweaking and draining the creative process.

In part one of this two-part series on MIDI and Songwriting, I’ll cover the basics of MIDI, how it works, and what you need to know. I’ll also show you how to set up for MIDI recording using Reason and Pro Tools.

Part two of this series talks about to use MIDI to enhance your creative flow as a songwriter.  Check out that article here.

What is MIDI?

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It’s an industry standard protocol which enables keyboard controllers, electronic instruments, and computers to communicate and synchronize with each other. …Huh?

Basically, this is what you need to know: MIDI does not transmit actual audio. MIDI transmits information about musical events including pitch, note velocity (intensity), volume, and vibrato. MIDI information is everything about a musical phrase except for the sound itself. Most commonly, you would use a MIDI keyboard controller to record the MIDI information to your software sequencer. Again - you’re only recording digital information, not actual audio. So where does the sound come from?

The audio comes from a sampler or a synthesizer, which gets assigned to the recorded MIDI sequence. The MIDI sequence dictates how to present and arrange the audio coming from the sampler or synth. If the sampler is set to a grand piano sound, the MIDI information dictates how the chords and melodies are crafted and performed.

The Connections

You and your instrument: A MIDI Piano keyboard is the most common instrument for recording with MIDI. These days, many of them are USB powered. I suggest going for at least a 61-key, as anything less can be quite limiting. Weighted keys are always a nice feature, but not totally necessary in my opinion.  The M-Audio Keystation is a solid choice.

Instrument to computer: The keyboard is connected to your computer using a USB cable.  In the past, MIDI cables were the only option.  As the computer began to play a larger role in the process, MIDI to USB adapters became necessary.  Today, you can forget about dealing with MIDI cables and adapters, and simply use a strait USB connection.

Recording the performance: MIDI sequencing software is used to record the information transmitted from the instrument through the USB cable to your computer.  Pro Tools is the industry standard, but there are many others.  My personal preference is to use Reason as it provides a dedicated combination of MIDI sequencing with samplers and synths (discussed below).

Performance to audio: Now that your performance has been captured by your software and recorded in the form of MIDI information, you need give your performance a “voice” by assigning a sampler or synthesizer to it.  Samplers and synths can be in the form of hardware components, which would come next in your chain: Computer out to sampler in.  These days, especially in home-recording set-ups, software samplers and synths are most commonly used.  A software sampler calls on recorded .wav or .aiff files and assigns them as the output audio for your MIDI information.  Again, my software of choice here is Reason as it provides a host of awesome software samplers and synths to fuel the creative juices.

Audio to speakers: The last step in the chain is to output the audio to speakers.  This usually involves some kind of digital audio interface connected to a mixer, amplifier, and speakers.  For my home-recording studio, I use the MBox which is then connected to my powered speakers.  The MBox is connected to my computer via USB.

MIDI + Reason + Pro Tools

As I noted above, my weapons of choice for music production are Pro Tools combined with Reason.  By using both in my process, I can utilize the awesome creative tools from Reason — the samplers, synths, and dedicated MIDI sequencer while harnessing the power of Pro Tools for recording live audio, plus mixing and mastering.

The idea is to sync Reason with Pro Tools, so that both are on the same tempo clock, and the audio from Reason is ported directly into a track in Pro Tools.  The way to achieve this is to utilize the built-in ReWire interface.  ReWire allows you to open up Reason as if it were a plug-in on a track.  You use one of the track’s inputs for this.

The process of setting it up goes like this:

1. Fire up a Pro Tools session (Reason is not yet launched).
2. Create a new stereo track.
3. Where you select input effects, choose Instrument > Reason.
4. This will automatically launch the Reason application.
5. The audio coming out of Reason is now played through your track in Pro Tools.  All time code is synced.

And there you have it.  I hope this served as your guide to setting up your MIDI computer recording studio.  Be sure to check out part two of this series, where I’ll talk about how you can use MIDI to enhance your songwriting process without disturbing your creative flow.

Over to you…

How does your MIDI setup work?  What’s your software / hardware of choice?

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