MIDI Manipulation

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From the course by Berklee College of Music

Pro Tools Basics

286 ratings

Berklee College of Music

Pro Tools Basics

286 ratings

Course 3 of 4 in the Specialization Music Production

Producing music is an incredibly creative process, and knowing the tools of the trade is essential in order to transmit the musical ideas in your head into the DAW in a creative and uninhibited way. Whether you have used a computer to create music before, or you have been curious about production for years, this 4-week course will give you an introductory look into the world of Avid Pro Tools and Pro Tools First.

From the lesson

Exploring MIDI and Software Instruments

In this lesson, we'll focus on MIDI and software instruments. We'll start by learning about the different kinds of sound waves. Next, we'll learn the difference between samplers and synthesizers and how to use them in music production. We'll also learn how to manipulate and automate MIDI.

Introduction to On-Board Software Instruments1:56

Wave Basics2:19

Synthesizers11:48

MIDI Manipulation6:39

Meet the Instructors

Chrissy Tignor-Fisher
Assistant Professor
Contemporary Writing and Production

[MUSIC]

Once you have a chord progression with a sound that you like and expand, you can

manipulate the MIDI data further to get more close to what sound you're going for.

So I've created a chord progression by layering this orchestral sound with

a grand piano.

So let's have a listen to hear what it sounds like.

[MUSIC]

So, when I listened back to this, I automatically hear some differences on how

hard and loud those notes are hit, from the way that I played them.

So my third chord is actually much harder and harsher than the other ones.

And if you don't see all of your MIDI events or MIDI data,

you can always expand your MIDI editor, and

also zoom in and out if you remember in the bottom right hand corner.

If I deselect each one of these events that I've played,

you can see that they have a different variation in shades of blue.

And what that different shade means is actually what's called velocity.

And velocity is a measurement of how hard you hit the key.

And usually velocity and volume go hand in hand.

If you hit the key harder, it's going to get louder.

When we're dealing with samplers,

it actually plays a different sample depending on how hard you hit the key.

So if we're trying to make something sound realistic or

balanced, it's really important to keep our velocities consistent.

You can see in my MIDI editor that we have different variations of blue, which means

some of these velocities were hit very hard and some were hit quite soft.

As we expected, that third chord here is a really dark blue,

which means I hit it way too hard.

So if we want to change the velocity and make this more consistent and

make it sound better, we can hold down the Command key or

the Control key to click and drag up and down on each one of these MIDI events.

And as you can see when I press Command, it'll bring up this upside down bracket.

And if I hold Command,

click and drag, [SOUND].

You can hear the change, and you can also see the change in the color of the blue.

So I'm going to do this with all of these events and

get them all closer to the shade that I'm looking for.

And that's going to be at kind of a medium velocity, and

not necessarily as hard as I hit that third chord.

[SOUND].

You can see that all of my velocities are not exactly the same,

which is actually going to help make this sound more realistic,

because human beings don't actually play anything exactly the same way twice.

So I want these to be close in terms of color and velocity value, but

I don't want them to be exactly the same.

So I'm going to play this back, and we'll see if the third chord sounds any better.

[MUSIC]

And I think that definitely made a difference in how this sounds and

how nicely all of those chords sit together.

So if I wanted to transpose any of this, which means change the note of my chords,

I can Command or Control A to select them all and drag them up and down.

[MUSIC]

And I've changed the key entirely but my chord progression stayed the same.

If I want to copy any of these MIDI events we can actually take what we've

already done and maybe bring it up an octave or down an octave.

To undo what we've already done, we want to use the command, Command Z or

Control Z, which will undo everything that we've done.

If I want to transpose these to an octave up, I hit Option or

Alt, depending if you're Mac or PC.

Click on the notes [SOUND] and drag them up.

[MUSIC]

And that has copied everything I played in up an octave.

[MUSIC]

And this is how we start building our arrangement.

Sometimes when we quantize things we don't want them to be absolutely perfect and

to the grid.

This will give it more of a human feel and a little bit less like a computer.

And there are some options in the quantize menu that can help you achieve that.

So if you hit Command A on Mac or Control A on PC, and then Option or Alt 0,

to bring up your quantization menu, you'll see you have multiple different options.

For example,

we can add a swing function which is going to give you more of a triplet feel.

And you can also choose your quantization strength

which is going to give you how much it's going to be quantized to the grid.

If it's 100%, it goes from wherever you played it directly to the grid.

If it's somewhere in between, like 50%,

it will go from wherever you played it to 50% toward the grid.

And all of these functions can make something more human and

sound more like a person played it and less like a computer.

But one of my favorite functions with quantizing is something called randomizing

which is under this Randomize button.

And I like this because it chooses certain MIDI events to randomly quantize and

the ones that it chooses not to.

Which means that you have some that are going to be quite on the grid and

others that are going to be more free.

So you can choose a certain percentage for this and

experiment to see what it does to your MIDI events.

So if I choose 34% randomize and

apply you can see that ever so slightly my events move off the grid.

And if I zoom in for this.

You can see each individual chord note is now slightly away from the grid.

And I think that's a really great function to use especially if you want to create

more realism in your MIDI.

The difference that this makes, may not be that obvious when all you have is a chord

progression, but when you have multiple MIDI events working together,

the more differentiation you have in the quantizing it's

going to make it sound more like a real band or a real ensemble and

it's going to make a huge difference in your overall production.

[MUSIC]

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