fbpx

Article Categories

 

 

May 18-Processing Audio with MIDI Control

MAY-Is-MIDI-Month-2.011

Some MIDI instruments, particularly those from Arturia, include an external input for processing audio signals through the synthesizer's filter, VCA, and effects modules. That's cool enough, but of course, what's even cooler is that is that you can then use MIDI to trigger filter and VCA envelopes, turn filter resonance up high and use a keyboard t...

Continue reading
2831 Hits

May 16-The Advantages of Starting Songs with MIDI

MAY-Is-MIDI-Month-2.013

When you're songwriting, you want nothing to get in the way of your creativity, and you want as fast a workflow as humanly possible—so for those reasons, you're better off starting the songwriting process with MIDI rather than recording audio (if not you're not a keyboard player, even a simple MIDI guitar controller like the Jamstik+ or You Rock gu...

Continue reading
3070 Hits

May 15-Arpeggiation Meets Percussion

MAY-Is-MIDI-Month-2.014

Most people of think of arpeggiation solely in melodic terms, but arpeggiation has additional uses. General MIDI instruments include drum kits where the top notes are percussion sounds, and many virtual instruments include percussion presets. Setting up an arpeggiator in a random mode to trigger various percussive sounds can create a really cool ef...

Continue reading
2827 Hits

May 13-Why You Need a Controller with More Octaves

MAY-Is-MIDI-Month-2.016

If you think of a keyboard as playing only notes, four or five octaves may be sufficient. However, many virtual instruments (e.g., FXpansion Geist, Native Instruments Kontakt, EastWest's Play engine, etc.) use MIDI keys not only to play specific notes but also to trigger articulations or variations on a basic sound. If your main USB MIDI controller...

Continue reading
2824 Hits

May 12-Get Your Groove On

MAY-Is-MIDI-Month-2.017

Quantizing MIDI notes to precise rhythmic values on a grid can sound "mechanical." This isn't necessarily a bad thing, particularly with techno, electro, etc. But for musical genres that aren't quite as rigid in terms of tempo, overly tight quantization can sound stiff. Enter groove quantization: instead of quantizing to a grid, you can call up a p...

Continue reading
2925 Hits