MIDI Composition and Digital Editing

By Grant Derigo, Sarah Johnson and Jackie Rapp

Some valuable digital tools include:

• MIDI
• digital editing
• looping and sampling

MIDI

MIDI Piano

MIDI or musical instrument digital interface is a type of digital protocol that allows various MIDI capable digital instruments to communicate with each other. Though this, computers, synthesizers, samplers, sound-cards and MIDI keyboards/controllers can synchronize with each other and be controlled from a single source.

MIDI instruments do not produce actual audio. Instead they transmit instructions or commands to computers or sequencers as to what notes to play, and the dynamics and duration of each note. The advantage to using MIDI is that one has the ability to edit individual notes. Imagine you are recording a seven minute long song and six minutes into it you strike a wrong note. Instead of stopping and re-recording the entire six minutes over again, MIDI allows the user to select the single wrong note and correct it without affecting the rest of the music. Another advantage of working with MIDI is that one can record two separate tracks (A and B), at two separate tempos, with two different keys. Without ever re-recording any of the audio, the user can transpose the key of track A to match the key of track B, and can then match the tempo of track A to the tempo of track B.  With all these capabilities, composers can write music for entire symphonies all from the convenience of a single piano.

Digital Editing

The advent of computer based recording studios introduced one of the most significant advances in audio recording technology — digital editing.  Producers now have the ability to duplicate tracks, cut and past, and even undo edits all with the click of a mouse.  This process, which had previously entailed long hours cutting tape with a razor blade with no hopes of salvaging mistakes, is now reduced to a few minutes all with the magic of digital editing programs.  These programs range in price from free (Audacity, LMMS, SndBite, SoX, WaveSurfer) to a few hundred dollars (Pro Tools,Logic Pro, Soundforge 9, ACID 7, Cubase), the latter group being capable of replacing entire rooms full or studio equipment at a fraction of the price.

Looping and Sampling

One of the most important ways that digital editing revolutionized audio recording is by giving users the ability to loop and sample songs.  Sampling is using a part of one song to form part of another song.  This could mean using a drum track or bass line from one song, like MC Hammer did with the bass line to Rick Jame’s “Super Freak” to make part of the song “Can’t Touch This.”  This could also include using audio from a movie or television show as part of the song for effect.

Looping is similar to sampling, only it involves taking a short portion of music that would sound good repeated, and essentially copying ad pasting it multiple times onto a songs time line.  Through looping, producers can take a short recording of each section of a song and arrange them to make the entire sing.  A musician could record three different parts, each one measure long — part A, part B and part C.  By repeating and arranging phrases in a specific manner, a producer can create an entire song from these three small samples of music.  Lets say here that part A represents the verse of a song, B is the chorus and C is the bridge or solo.  We can arrange them like so: AAAA BB AAAA BB CCCC CCCC AA BBBB.  A 26 measure song has now been created from three parts, each a measure long.  Since each part of the song is recorded separately, producers can make changes in the structure of a song without having to re-record a continuous take each time.