Now we'll look at the common MIDI recording and editing functions that you'll need to use regardless of the DAW. You have to be comfortable with these techniques. So we're going to just review them right now and then you'll go to your DAW and figure them out there. So what we have now is a bass line and drum groove. The bass line was recorded as audio, and the drum groove is being played back by a sampler. Now I'd like to point out what a sampler is and talk about some of the specifics of a sampler in general. Now we see that I'm using one DAW made by a company, and I have a plug-in from a separate company. So this is that plug-in idea where a different company can build a synthesizer or sampler that functions with an apparent DAW. Now this sampler is designed specifically for drums. And we can see if I play this kick sound [SOUND], we hear a kick. And that is a recording of a kick drum in a specific room that was done at some other point. Now the beauty of this instrument, is it's a multi-sampled instrument. Meaning, meaning if I play different velocities it will p-playback a different recording. So the drummer originally played really quietly on a kick drum and recorded this sound. Hard even to hear and he played kind of at a moderate velocity and got this sound [NOISE] and then he played at a hard velocity and got this one [NOISE] that's mapped across the velocities of my keyboard. We call this multi-sampling and the beauty of this is it's not just the volume that's changing as you hit the key harder, but the timbre or sound of the instrument changes naturally and how it would if played by a real drummer. So a multi-sampled instrument is really important if you want to recreate the sound of an actual instrument, and this sampler does a great job at recreating a real drum sound. It really does sound like real drums because they've gone through all this careful recording and mapping of this instrument. Now we see on this instrument every key has a whole set of different samples and a single-sampled instrument can have thousands of samples. We find that working with sampled instruments can be very, very taxing on your hard drive because it's having to play back all these different audio files repeatedly and as soon as you hit the key. It's working that hard drive very, very hard. It can be quite processor intensive. You find that the large orchestral libraries really challenge what a computer can do, specifically the storage and RAM capabilities of that computer. Now I'll be using a synthesizer for the piano or chord part that'll be adding to the song. This is the instrument I'm using. Now we see that a synthesizer does not rely on prerecorded audio files. Instead, it uses kind of formulas or algorithms of simple wave forms and then builds up from there. And we'll look at synthesis more later in this semester, but it's important to know right now that a synthesizer will tax your CPU much harder than it will kind of hard drives and RAM because it's having to calculate the sound in real time, not pull it from a hard drive. So it's important to know when working with a DAW what part of the computer is being taxed by what you're doing. If you're working heavily with samplers and audio files, you'll find that the hard drive is going to be used a lot, because it's going to be pulling from that to play back those audio files. If you're using synthesizers, the CPU will be using much more because it's having to calculate those wave forms in real time. Let's hear the drum and bass group as it stands right now. [MUSIC] I'm happy with this. I would just like to have some chords and a melody to go along with it. We find that recording MIDI is very much the same as recording audio. But there are some slight variations. Now before I even record this part, I'd like to point out that there are two different ways that just recording in general can work in a DAW. In some DAW's as soon as you hit the Record button it will start recording. In others like this one you record arm, or prepare the project for recording and then you hit the Play button for it to start recording. Now just like with audio I've practiced ahead of time so I know what I'm going to play, and I could give good performance, and now I'm ready to go, I have my count off set, my click tracks on, and I'm going to record a cord part to go along with this. [MUSIC]. So I've recorded my part and now we can start editing it. Now most DAW's are set up the same exact way. And we call this kind of view the piano roll editor or the graphic editor. And it's how we manipulate the notes that we have recorded as MIDI. Right away you want to look at your MIDI editor, at your piano roll editor, and you have to figure out some things. You want to identify where the notes are located and also where the velocities are located. So very often you see the same kind of format. We have a piano roll with horizontal rectangles denoting each individual note. And then at the underneath, you'll find that you have the velocities and that every single one of the rectangle notes has an associated velocity along with it. And you have to be able to edit the velocity amount for each one of the notes individually. It's a very important type of editing. Zooming can be a little more complicated with MIDI than it is with audio. Because you'll have to zoom horizontally, and also vertically. And also scroll up and down. It's very easy to kind of get lost, and not even see the MIDI notes you're working on until you scroll them into the correct location. So take a moment when you get into the, the DAW. And really figure out how you can efficiently scroll and zoom within this editor. The next thing we'll want to do is see how to edit an individual MIDI note. And this is going to be the virtually the same as editing an audio region. You can grab the end of the note. Kind of edge edit it, the beginning of the note, edge edit it there, just like we did in with audio regions. You can grab the middle and drag it back and forth, or move it to a different pitch. Now one setting that is in almost all DAW's is the ability to MIDI through, or monitor, or listen to the notes as you're moving them. You see, as I move this, I'm not hearing it. And sometimes it's nice to get an audible, sound for as you move the notes. And this DAW, I have a headphone icon here. Most DAW's, though, have a way to get a MIDI through, or a m-, MIDI monitor as you're dragging things around. And now, if I move this note. [MUSIC]. Which can make it much easier when editing MIDI so look for that function in your DAW, and note how to turn it on and off. It can be really, really useful. The next thing I want to do with this is clean it up a bit. I see there's an extra note right here. I'll just select that and I'll use the Delete key on my keyboard, but of course you need to know how to get rid of unwanted MIDI notes. It's an important function. So overall I like the performance. but I thought it was a little sloppy. it's not as tight as I would like it to be. If I look at the downbeat of measure three or the first beat of measure three, we see that I was a bit ahead of the beat or. Early in my performance. And I would like that to be a little more lined up with the bar, a little more in time, as if I was a better player than I really am. And the function that does that in a DAW as we mentioned earlier is quantization which will automatically move something to a predefined musical grid. Now you can just select everything and quantize it all at once. But, it's often nice to be able to quantize just small portions that are really farther out. I think you'll find that if you are a little more selective with your quantization and if you use some quantization strength, you can get a better performance overall. So I'll select these notes and then you'll hear there, sometimes it's kind of annoying to have that audible [UNKNOWN] on, so I'll turn it off. And then we'll quantize the notes. Again, this is something else that you're going to want to know how to do. Very quickly, because you'll be doing it a lot. Now we have a set of common quantization settings. The first is our quantization grid. And we can set that to a standard musical grid. So like, chord notes, eighth note, eighth note triplets. And so forth. Now in this performance I know I did play some 16ths, so that's what I'll leave it on, is a 16th note grid. We often have options to quantize the beginnings and ends of the notes. Musicians, in general, in real performances, tend not to be as careful with the ends of notes as they are with the beginning. So I often find it's nice to quantize just the beginnings of the notes. And leave a lot of variation in the ends of notes to get a more musical performance. If you're trying for a more robotic or technical feel, you may want to adjust both the beginning and ends of the notes. And finally I have a quantization amount which is often called a quantization strength. And that's defining how far the notes will be pulled to that grid. If that's at 100% which I can do right here, and I'll quantize it we see that it brings those notes all the way right on the beat and again I've left that variability at the end of the note. Now, I'll undo that. Another really important key command to get used to. And this time, I'll quantize to a percentage. I'll try 20%. And I like 20%, because it will make it tighter. But it's never going to bring it all the way. And I can continually do that again and again. To get it closer and closer, get it tighter and tighter, until I'm really happy with the performance. Now I'll go ahead and quantize all this material. And I feel like I was a little more off than I wanted to be, so I'll use a quantization strength of around 50% and bring things kind of half way to their grid. And now, I'll hit play and check the performance out. [MUSIC]. So I like the performance right now but I don't love the voicings and when you have cords the voicings are kind of the up and down organization of the notes. And we're free to move notes by octave, maintain the cord and change the voicing. I'm going to take this bottom line so this is the bottom line of the chord, and I'm going to move it up an octave. So it was on G3 here, and I'll bring it up to G4. And let's hear this now. [MUSIC] It's a nice brighter, crunchier sound. I really like how it fits now. One of the things we'll talk about next week is mixing, and one of the big challenges in mixing is kind of getting instruments out of each other way across the frequency range. So some of those things can kind of compete with each other across the frequency range. And often we find that we try to fix things in mixing that could be fixed within the MIDI data or within the performance themselves. And this idea of adjusting octaves also known as adjusting the range or register of an instrument can really have a major impact and can make it much easier to mix. So we find that if you can, if you can get the instruments and the performances correct here, the mixing challenges will be much less later on, and I like this performance here. Now, I think I was playing a little bit heavy handed, I'd like to reduce the velocity of all these. And before I do that, I'd like to point something out. Remember, each MIDI note consists of actually two events, a MIDI on event and a MIDI note off event. We said earlier that there is a MIDI on velocity, which we're seeing right here at this dot, but there's also a MIDI off velocity and this DAW has decided to actually not display that information, which is actually very common. It is happening in the background. There is MIDI off velocity, it's just not showing it within this DAW to make the display nice and clean. I'm going to go ahead and select all the MIDI notes and just bring their velocities down a little bit. And it's important to know how to kind of batch process notes to adjust all the velocities at the same time. One other thing that's important with MIDI recording is the ability to add to that region. So with audio, you can't really add more to an audio track that's already in place, but with MIDI, I can actually add in another line to this. And I'd like to add a melody to this keyboard part. As if the keyboard player were playing keyboard and melody at the same time. Now that's common for keyboard players to do, but I'm not a good enough keyboard player to do that all at once by myself. So I can record it in two separate passes, and add the melody right to the same region. This function is called overdub or MIDI merge. And it's really important to know how to overdub or MIDI merge in your DAW. In this one we have an OVR or Overdub button. If I have that off and I rewind and record. [MUSIC] We see that all the chord information was deleted as the new notes were entered. Functioning very much like audio does. It's kind of a destructive kind of record. I'll end do that. I'll turn over dub recording on and we'll try it now. We'll see a big difference. [MUSIC]. [MUSIC]. [SOUND]. And I was able to add my melody along with the chord part right in that clip. So those are the important techniques I wanted to show you with MIDI editing. When you go to your DAW after this lesson, I'd like you to explore MIDI recording editing in some detail. Take some time, and focus on just how to get efficient with the MIDI recording and editing. Figure out how to. Add software instruments. Record MIDI. Overdub record MIDI. Efficiently edit including zooming, moving, edge editing and changing the octave of notes. And quantization that you can quantize to a selected grid and to mount and finally adjusting velocities of individual notes and for a group of notes at once.
