Playing Smart: A Drummers Guide to Modern Technology - MIDI

Playing Smart: A Drummers Guide to Modern Technology – MIDI

By: Dross – Issue 13

In the Playing Smart series in Sick Drummer Magazine, we’ve covered a lot of great topics, some having no doubt more relevance to you as a drummer than others. Before I get too ahead of myself with all of the cool new toys continually being introduced, I want to take a step back in this issue and discuss MIDI. Think about all those dumb jokes you have to put up with in rehearsal such as “what do you call people who hang out with musicians? Drummers”! I want to arm you guys so you can look right at your lead guitar player and tell him “You know, if you connect a MIDI controller to that effects module of yours, you can probably hide the fact that you play that same contrived lead over and over in every song by at least changing the tone of the lead”! While he is turning red and thinking of a come back to hurl at you, you can tell Professor Redundant that you are just kidding (kind of anyways) and that if he seriously ever wants to add some new textures to his sound, you can help him hook up the equipment to do it.

So, what is MIDI anyway and why and how is it relevant to drummers? MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and was developed in 1982. MIDI is essentially an industry-standardized language for electronic equipment to communicate and synchronize with each other. MIDI allows computers, drum modules, keyboards, MIDI controllers, samplers and other sound modules to control one another and exchange system data. There is absolutely no audio transmitted via MIDI, rather “event messages” are transmitted such as what notes are played, when they were played, with what velocity they were played and so forth.

Let me spell this out to you in plain language now and tell you how it is relevant to you. If you use triggers, you clamp the trigger onto your drums, you run a cable to your drum module right? Then if you want to record not only your mic’d bass drums for instance but you want to record the MIDI performance, you’d run a MIDI cable from your drum module’s MIDI out jack to the MIDI input on your computer. You would then arm the tracks you are about to record including your MIDI track and hit record. As you played the drums, your sound module would transmit data to your computer telling it what you hit, when you hit it and how hard you hit each thing. It would transmit each instrument on its own note so that you can clearly see and hear everything separately. Sequencers show each MIDI note as a separate key (or note) on a piano. You could then run a MIDI cable back out of your computer and into your sound module and change programs on your drum module directly from your computer or play your module from your computer. To hear your drum module you’ll of course have to connect the audio out jacks, since again no actual audio is transmitted via MIDI. You would be able to then make any kinds of edits you’d like to make, to say your bass drums making sure notes are even and not jumbled and then send the data back out of your computer to your module while recording the audio output of the module at the same time. This will allow you to have a new cleaner version of your performance.

Another example of how you can take advantage of MIDI as a drummer is by triggering a drum, cymbal or trigger pad to play sounds on a sampler. You can trigger 808 booms, explosions, reverse cymbals or reverse explosions for that matter, the intro for your demo or album, movie samples, prerecorded background vocals, keyboard parts and on and on it goes. You can simply run a trigger to your drum module or to an Alesis Trigger I/O and then plug the MIDI out of your unit to the MIDI in jack of your sampler. Don’t forget to run the audio out samples from your sampler to the house PA!. MIDI may seem intimidating to you now but it is actually pretty simple to set up and get equipment talking to each other. There is tons of info out there for you to learn more about MIDI and how it works. All of the manuals for your equipment can walk you through basic setups. The more tools that are available to you the broader your creativity can run. Oh yeah, and just so you are armed…should you actually decide to blast your guitarist, you just need to tell him that if he’d buy a MIDI controller, he can program it to send MIDI messages to his effects processor so that he can seamlessly change patches with each click of the pedal.

Equipment Information:

1. Good MIDI interface for triggering a sampler or getting MIDI data to a soft synth or sequencer. This is NOT a sound module and therefore contains no audio data. This unit simply converts triggers into MIDI data.