Toolkit

MIDI Effects and Arpeggiators

In an industry where effects plugins, software DAWs and hardware technologies are ever-evolving, you’ve got to hand it to MIDI. Who knew that a protocol initially designed to allow hardware keyboards from rival manufacturers to ‘talk to one another’ would endure, with so little change to its protocol, getting on for four decades later? MIDI’s success lies in its simplicity; a single MIDI Note On message contains a line of code containing Note Number (Pitch, to you and me), Velocity (most frequently mapped to volume, but actually a freely-assignable controller, stimulated by the ‘strength’ of a key stroke) and Note Length, which is calculated when a note is released. Add in the Note Position – the Bar number, Beat number and sub-Beat number – of any note and you’ve got a single line of code which ensures that the playback of any MIDI sequence is a carbon copy of the line recorded or created in the first place.

But, of course, we producers do like to meddle. While real-time recording of MIDI is a great boon for musicians who like to bring a natural feel and performance to the sequences they record, with everything from quantise (timing correction of Note Position data to ensure it locks to a rhythmical grid) to manually deleting notes recorded in error, another of MIDI’s great strengths is how ready it is to be manipulated in post-production.

This month’s Toolkit is dedicated to MIDI effects which aim to do precisely this. By mangling key MIDI parameters, it’s possible to bring everything from subtle processing of MIDI data streams to wild and spectacular ones, bringing levels of performance impossible to generate in real time. Perhaps the best example of this is arpeggiation, where chords of MIDI notes are broken down into their component notes and rapidly ‘cycled’, to give upwards, downwards or random-direction cascades of notes, which we explore in the video this month.

There are a number of other highly useful MIDI processing techniques which can be used to add creative layers to your productions. In our 6-step walkthrough, we’re looking at the capabilities offered by note repeating (with velocity and pitch offsets), as well as applying LFO-style shapes to key MIDI parameters, to create ramping effects. We’ve chosen velocity as the parameter here, but you could just as easily create stepped glissandi (selecting pitch as a target), or even note length. In our 3-step walkthrough, we target velocity again, to address a common problem experienced when recording MIDI parts in real time. It’s not always easy to produce a ‘smooth’ performance when you’re recording notes live. Taming velocities can produce an ‘optimum’ performance in postproduction, without time-consuming adjustments having to be made to every velocity event in your sequence.