Electronic Music, Unit 3

Assignment 1 (Notes)

 MIDI stands Musical Instrument Digital Interface

It's a programming language. It is NOT "electronic sound"! It allows electronic instruments to send signals to a computer, to be used in programs like Logic.

In order to accurately playback a note, the computer will recognize a MIDI note's velocity (how hard it was struck), the time it was held down, and what time it was pressed/released,

An instrument that works using MIDI is called a controller.

There are many types of these to symbolize different types of instruments.

A MIDI sequencer is a program that records MIDI information to generate music on the computer. Logic has this feature built in.

MIDI information can be sent through a sequencer and create a MIDI file, with the format .mid

There is a second, more advanced, multi-instrument MIDI file called .smf or Standard MIDI file

These come in two forms: 0 and 1,

0 = one track (song) of a maximum of 16 instruments and any length

1 = multiple tracks, with many more instruments possible

The 0 and 1 instead of 1 and 2 are because MIDI is based on standard computer code in the binary system; this is also why there are sixteen sounds for each MIDI track

There are 128 different MIDI-compatible musical sounds, mimicking all sorts of instruments

They are numbered in a logical and standardized way so all computers can recognize each one

Although MIDI is unexceptionally sounding compared to other formats such as .mp3, it is useful because you can create and edit .mid and .smf files with controllers and programs, which is very powerful!

 

Assignment 2 (Notes)

MIDI, Musical Instrument Digital Interface, created in 1983 by Dave Smith.

It's a programming language. It is NOT sound!

The keyboards in the room are actually controllers, and work by MIDI rather than generating sound.

MIDI = TV remote anology, sound does not come out of the remote, it comes from the TV, but the remote controls the TV.

MIDI works in Logic in the form of AU plugins.

Virtual synthesizers are used, emulate real instrument sounds.

External and software synthesizers, we use the latter

You can use various instruments for MIDI in Logic.
When a key is pressed on the keyboard controller, it sends a MIDI signal to the computer and creates a sound.

The green MIDI sections of sound do not use transients, they have lines.

Press Q to Quantize!

The color of each line is based on how hard the key was pressed (velocity)

Green-colored Apple loops are MIDI loops, which is different from the regular blue loops.

MIDI creates customizable, original sounds!

 


Assignment 3

Screenshots:
TN1: http://i.imgur.com/rzkvmM7.png

TN2: http://i.imgur.com/N73sXzv.png

TN4:  http://i.imgur.com/JApm6eu.png

that doesn't sound completely sick!

Wow! This is going beyond just playing notes on the controller and playing them back on the computer with Logic. This is mixing a synth track, and the possibilities of the kind of stuff you can create with this are endless. I really like the places that this unit on MIDI is going.

 

The MIDI song I downloaded, before I made any edits:

 

After making edits:

 

Assignment 4

HTML Drum:

 

Audiotool Drum:

{for me this HTML is playing another song, so here is the link just in case this doesn't work: http://www.audiotool.com/track/tr-808_practice-ffph0epl/)

 

Now for the Ultrabeat...

I watched this video for my research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg3Df0SBIcE

 

First off, in order to get the Ultrabeat, you need to create a new software instrument track, which defaults to the Electric Piano. To change the piano to the Ultrabeat, you need to mouse over the blue button ("instrument slot") that says "Electric Piano" on the left inspector channel strip. Then, the blue button will turn into three smaller ones. Click on the rightmost one, select "Ultrabeat (Drum Synth)" and then use the arrow to select "Stereo".

Now you need to click on the center of the three buttons that form out of the main blue one. This brings up the Ultrabeat interface, where all the music is made. On the left side is a list of all sorts of different types of drums. On the bottom are 32 equal gray bars that are numbered from 1 to 32 with a division after every four of them. These 32 bars correspond to two measures of sixteenth notes. When a certain drum is clicked (on the left) the bottom displays which notes it is going to cycle through once played. There are a lot of presets that can be selected on the far upper left, but the flat one with nothing is called "Tutorial Kit". You can play only one drum, or all 25 of them at the same time!

Every note does not automatically fill up the entire bar. They have two factors: velocity and gate. Velocity, based on the MIDI velocity rating of how hard a note is hit, is how loud the note is. Gate is long the sound is. Velocity can be increased and decreased by changing the size of the blue bar filler up and down, and gate is changed by stretching the note left to right. You can fill in any portion of any note and then press "reset" and they will all default to a certain velocity and gate. This is what I did.

In the center of the interface is this giant, complicated, and scary controller system with four dials and some wave patterns and a LOT of buttons. I did not have time to experiment with all of them, and tip #5 told me to ignore the oscillators (the upper and lower dials and their related buttons). The wave patterns in the lower and upper right of the interface have a massive effect on how the beats sound, once the waves are stretched out. I didn't like the stretched out version so I stuck with something close to the standard. Once you are ready to port the beats into your song, you drag the tiny gray button on the lower bar (second from left) into an empty Ultrabeat slot in the arrange window. The button has 8 dots that glow red when you mouse over it; despite it's importance it's very very small for some reason. Once the beats are in, they will convert into MIDI data, so it's possible to have another instrument play it. You could create a few patterns or repeat the first one. There are probably millions of different drum combinations waiting to be created using Logic's Ultrabeat!

 

This is a song I made during my practice with Ultrabeat and the session drummer (it includes both).

I'd also like to say, I found a "guitar" called "British Combo Synth Lead". It has the most epic sound ever! I used it for this song and for the remake of the MIDI file in Assignment 3.

 

 

Assignment 5

(sorry for lack of notes but I was running out of time)


Key commands:

Command Option A - Quickly creates a new audio track underneath the track you have selected. Not a MIDI track, an audio track, compatible with the Apple loops.

Command Option S - Same as Cmd+Opt+A but instead of creating an audio track it creates a MIDI-capable instrument track.

Command R - Creates a duplicate of the track you have selected. The duplicate is placed after its original. This could mess up some really crowded areas but can be really helpful in other areas. Too bad I didn't know about this earlier!

Command U - Sets up the upper yellow bar to repeat the segment that you have selected and everything that plays along with it. e.g. if my song is divided into an intro, chorus, verse, etc. I can click on an 8-bar electric piano region that plays for the entire chorus and nothing else and then do Cmd+U and the entire chorus section will repeat. But, if I selected a drum track that was one giant entity that covered the chorus and the verse, both of those would repeat together.

Good for quickly testing out areas and another useful tool that I could have taken advantage of earlier! 

Command Shift Drag on end of audio region - I was first trying to do this at the very end of the region as if I was going to stretch it, but what this actually does is quickly equip the fade tool, do its magic, and then go back to the pointer tool or whatever you were using.

Control B - This popped up a window that said "Bounce Regions in Place" at the top. I figured that this would be bouncing only one track at a time, but when I pressed OK it duplicated the track I had into another track that was on solo mode. Also, a strange symbol appeared to the right of the name of the original track that I had highlighted when I pressed Opt+B, and a different one was created on the duplicate. I could play the duplicate just fine, but the original was permanently muted. I didn't really see what is the point of this command, so I watched a video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmpBkqIhTwU

Apparently, this condenses MIDI files into something with transients and this conserves computing power. Huh, It didn't do anything to the regular audio track that I did the command to, but in a second try, this time on the British Combo Synth, it did change it! A new duplicate was created below it, it locked the original, just like with the first test, but this time it did look different. The downside to this is that the MIDI tracks are no longer editable. If I edit the original, now perma-muted track, the edits do not carry on to the duplicate. A less useful and less common command than the others, but I guess if you are using a weak computer with Logic this might be helpful (I don't know how much more helpful, however).


Quiz:
First try: 82.61%

http://i.imgur.com/P3tov9K.png

Second try: 100%

http://i.imgur.com/dGvbV1j.jpg