When did you hear of MIDI and what did you think it was and how it could be useful?

I first heard about MIDI when I was in college. I knew about music synthesis, which is creating sounds for synthesizers, but MIDI was something I learned about while I was in Berklee. At that time MIDI wasn’t part of their curriculum. It came out in the early 80’s. I went to college in 1984 so it wasn’t available until after I left. As far as the curriculum, we did use MIDI. I did some sequencing during my last year of college but it was very primitive compared to now. I knew what it did but I didn’t know how much it would grow.

I actually never had any schooling with MIDI. I never took any MIDI classes. I just knew of it and I used it for some sequencing and production for my class but I wasn’t really taught how to use it. I started using it during my last semester in college for projects in my Advanced Production class. A friend of mine had a computer at home and we were also able to sign out a computer at Berklee with a little MIDI interface and I used that. I incorporated MIDI into my final production to kind of challenge myself and not just bring a band in to record, but actually have some pre-production. I felt that with what it could do even at that time I could do preproduction and basically come into the studio and save a lot of time knowing that the session would run more smoothly. I could lay out the rhythms and just do overdubbing in the studio and use the studio time more wisely because of what was already done outside. Because just like here (NEIA) we really didn’t have enough studio time to do the job you wanted to do. You might get a decent grade on the project, but if you want a product that you can really use for your portfolio or kind of spring board into some kind of situation outside of school, you want it better than you really have time to do. So, I tried to do a lot outside of school and then when I came into the studio I did guitar and vocals overdubs and whatever was else that was needed. I didn’t want to do certain tricky recordings that may lead me into a situation where the recording didn’t turn out well. Plus I thought that putting that kind of effort into it would warrant a better grade.

How has MIDI changed over the years? Do you still use it today?

Yes. I use it everyday. It went from a very simple, limited number of instruments to a large amount of instruments and it’s gone into somewhat of a hiatus in certain cases. Some people have bypassed using MIDI and record directly into Pro Tools. I think that’s more of a factor of non-education. People just off the street went and bought Pro Tools and take the keyboard and play the audio into it and try to chop it up. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I like to perfect things with MIDI and then record it as audio. Non-educated users don’t understand why MIDI is beneficial so they kind of bypass that. Even though MIDI has grown, I think it’s changed in that it’s not relying as heavily on the traditional sequence oriented projects that limit the style of music. We can still trigger things but don’t usually because we can just drop a looped sample into an audio track.

If there was something you could change, leave out or add to MIDI, what would it be?

I’ve always been happy with it. The changes that have occurred regarding virtual instruments might have been something that I may have recommended but that’s been a nice benefit of having to use less external stuff. There is nothing I would be able to recommend or be unhappy with regarding MIDI. What’s happened over the past ten or fifteen years is probably what I would have recommended.

Who would you recommend to use MIDI?

Anyone recording with a computer. That should be your preliminary compositional skeleton, always. No matter what. You can use MIDI for click tracks and for rhythm tracks to get the groove going. So, even if you’re in the studio with a full band you should have some kind of click track which may include certain percussion elements that help with the groove that you want them to follow. Sometimes a click track doesn’t give the musicians the right feel right away so you have to instruct them. If you can just lay out with a few congas or shakers or whatever in addition to a simple click, that gives them a quicker grasp of the groove and saves studio time and gives you a better product.

In your opinion, how do you see MIDI changing in the future?

I see people bypassing it as I said because of the tools that are available in audio. They just bypass MIDI because they’re kind of afraid of it. They’re not educated in MIDI and don’t fully understand its potential. A lot of people pick up a computer and just feed in audio because of what computers can do. Even though my computer can do a lot more than it used to, I still rely on MIDI. When the computer can handle that kind of audio capabilities a lot of people will bypass MIDI and record something, chopping it up and trying to fix it, which is a totally waste of time. It’s just not going to be as good as it could be if you make it perfect first and then just record it clean and have no headaches. A lot of people that are trying to do that are not musicians so they have even more issues with timings and maybe not really playing musically. There are more quirky little riffs that aren’t really very musical. I mean, it might work; it’s just not as musical as a trained person may come up with for grooves and riffs which is part of the change, like rap music has changed. Some dance music also. The music that we get from computers, meaning computer generated recordings has changed because of the lack of musicianship from the initial programmer. They create things that are being created experimentally and there’s nothing wrong with that in most cases. It just changes what music that is being produced.

Some people feel that MIDI is the “Cop Out” since there is no physical performance. Do you feel this is true?

No. It is a performance. You’re playing. You’re recording a performance and if you decide to quantize it, that’s your choice. Just as when drum machines first came out people didn’t like drum machines because they didn’t sound right. If you quantize too much it’s not going to have a feel. It’s almost like you have to go the other way. You generally quantize the heck out of it to make it tight and then you go back and humanize it to whatever degree it needs. I wouldn’t loosen a kick or snare but I would loosen a high hat, toms and maybe a bass line to some degree. You have control over that. When it’s a live musician you don’t have that kind of control over how they play especially if they’re not up to par, which is unfortunate because sometimes some tracks don’t get used if they’re not as good. It becomes a waste of money because the musician couldn’t play it. So then, if I can perform it via MIDI and tighten it up and change it and assign a new sound to it, that to me is one of the better aspects of MIDI; that you can play it first and realize that you didn’t like that sound and be able to change it. If you record a piano and you record it with a microphone, that’s a sound you’re going to have to keep. If you record a piano part with MIDI you could either double it or you can replace the sound in the studio with a better one than you have at home. So you can actually do some stuff at home and bring it into a studio and assign it the sounds you like, record it into the computer and then go home and mix it. There are things that allow for the user to do a lot at home, bring it to someone like me who might tighten it, loosen it or clean it up, record it with better sounds than you have available at home and go home with a product that sounds the way that is usable for you. You can then do the mixing at home or even do premixes at home and let someone like me fine tune it. A lot of people come to me to do things that they can’t do at home like recording a vocal with a nice microphone. They may not know how to use compressors as well as some of the aspects of cleaning up. They may be using workstations that don’t have as much control internally. They build their arrangements up and then we dump them into my computer and I dissect it and clean it and shape it up and maybe change the length of choruses and things like that which is easier on the computer as opposed to a workstation. It’s pretty hard to get around in a workstation because it’s a little window and you’re editing a little bit differently than on a computer.

What MIDI equipment did you use at first?

I started out with a Mac SE which is the little one piece machine. They had small screens which were monochrome. It was one of the early Macs that came out. I used that with a one “in and out” MIDI interface by MOTU with a drum machine and a keyboard/sampler.

How can a band like a rock or jazz band take advantage of MIDI?

Initially they can do click tracks to some degree. Whatever rhythm they want to work with. They could play off of built rhythms. With MIDI you can actually take a live recording either recorded in a club or studio and can use drum triggers where the kick and the snare can be doubled based on a trigger threshold. Digital Performer has a feature where basically every time a sound exceeds the threshold it activates a MIDI track that spits out a note. You assign that to the appropriate unit so you can double instruments. Even rock bands can use it to brighten up or thicken up sounds. I’ve done that in a gospel recording where the guy had a piccolo snare and it was just too high pitched for the piece. It didn’t seem appropriate with the rest of the instrumentation so I took that snare and doubled it with a drum machine snare that was a little fatter. So MIDI allows you to control the sound of certain instruments because you can trigger stuff via MIDI or just add stuff later. You can add strings or an arrangement after someone has recorded it whether it’s synchronized or not. Sometimes you don’t have a click track for a live show but yet you can go back and add strings later and layer things that weren’t actually part of a live performance. It provides better production for the product.

Is MIDI expensive? Do I need a budget that’s ridiculously high as far as the home musician is concerned?

No. MIDI is not that expensive. You can get an interface for around forty dollars. You can buy a keyboard for three thousand dollars too. Right now you can buy controllers for about a hundred twenty dollars and you wouldn’t even need an interface because a lot of times they’ll have a USB port. So, it’s a lot less expensive than it used to be because a lot of programs like Reason have internal sounds. I mean, you buy a three hundred dollar program and you’ll have thousands of sounds and all you need is a way to trigger it. Since the cost has come down a lot more people are taking advantage of this. It’s actually cheaper to buy this stuff as apposed to recording in the studio. If you don’t know how to use it however, it doesn’t really reveal its full potential. Anyone CAN do it, but people fall shy of things like knowing what compression is, knowledge about using different types of microphones and certain techniques as far as why it sounds a certain way musically. There are so many related elements that people fall shy of and then they realize how hard it is to finish the product. They just think “Oh, never mind”. And they just maybe don’t follow through because it’s a lot of work. People think “I can do that” but there’s a motivational thing that with any business, with any industry or career, you have to have the dedication to follow through and if you’re not educated in that industry you tend to come across too many obstacles. I’ve been educated in this industry and I still have had obstacles the whole way. Most people would have quit a thousand times ago. You just don’t quit. It’s too easy to quit. Why even start if you’re going to quit? There are many people who end up coming to my studio because they can’t finish their product on their own. So in essence, they end up relying on me maybe more than they would have before because they don’t know how to use what they have to its fullest potential. I’ve had sessions where people come in with something and we end up working on it for three to four hours only to hit a dead end. I’d rather they find their dead end at home and then come in with something that is more workable. Then they can use equipment like my mics and preamps which they may not have access to at home. I found that there is less frustration during the sessions because the people that do have the setups come in with something that’s more session ready. They’re not booking a few hours with the mind set of “let’s see what happens”. They could have bought a piece of equipment for the time they spent at the studio and still had that piece of equipment for the rest of their lives to use at their leisure as needed.

What musical genre thus far has implemented MIDI most successfully and why do you feel this way?

Definitely rap. When I started it was underground and earlier on I survived with MIDI because of its existence. When I first started, people didn’t have their own systems. The rappers didn’t have the equipment and I barely had any equipment but they would come in and we would do loops, drum beats and some keyboards. So the minimal stuff I had in the early days is how I survived and is how my studio grew out of my apartment. I was doing ninety percent rap and I wasn’t a “rap guy”. Rap didn’t exist when I was in high school. It wasn’t a form of music yet but I saw it develop. So rap was the first benefactor of MIDI technology even though there are other technologies that they used in addition to that. I think that if MIDI wasn’t around, rap may not have been around either. It definitely wouldn’t have grown to what it is today. If that didn’t grow then all the off-shoot genres such as house, techno, drums and bass wouldn’t have developed as it has today. All that is from looping things and triggering with MIDI which previously didn’t exist. Dance music was Disco before that. You danced to disco….that was it! In the clubs there was disco with real people playing drums then MIDI came and other types of music were formed. It would have never happened if MIDI hadn’t come out when it did. People don’t usually think about that.

Some MIDI users use synths, controllers and other hardware in their setups. Do I have to have these to use MIDI and what are their advantages?

Well, you have to have something to trigger with. What you use to trigger is up to you. Most people play keyboards, if you’re a drummer you can use drum pads. Guitarists can use MIDI pickups. You have to have something to trigger with in a true performance. There’s things you can do with Reason, things you can click on and select but technically that’s not really MIDI in the same sense. MIDI is the communication between a device and the sequencer itself. Keyboards and keyboard controllers are the most common devices. What you use is up to you. I use keyboards, MIDI guitar pickup, and drum pads. There are a multitude of things. There are also MIDI trumpets and MIDI saxophones. For portability there are smaller versions that you can use with your laptop that still do the same thing and are very mobile. But you do want something to trigger with. Even though software programs allow for click-ability I don’t find a mouse to be as performance oriented as the keys themselves. When you’re clicking with the mouse you’re not using multiple keys. You can build a chord from it but you’re not actually playing the chord. Most performances would warrant that.

Would it be easy to teach someone how to use MIDI or is it complicated?

It can be easy. It does get complicated but in its simplest form it’s easy to use. It’s very simple initially. It depends on how complex you want to get but it’s very simple as far as the flow of triggering, recording and playing back. Once you’re set up, you should be fine.

I’d like to play an instrument but can’t afford a synth being that they are pricey; can I enjoy the advantages of MIDI and use a controller like a synth to just jam at home?

Yes. Something like Reason and a controller would cost you around five hundred dollars. That’s affordable.

What kind of MIDI setup would you recommend for the home user and which would you recommend for the serious or professional user?

It depends on the budget. These days there are a lot of internal sounds which saves a lot of money. I think setups for both the home and professional should include these internal sounds. It’s a virtual setup inside of your computer which gives you more flexibility and you can get more out of it. There is less bulkiness and lower cost. These setups are becoming more common. It just depends on how much you have in your computer to work with as far as availability of sounds. With Reason or Digital Performer and a little controller you have more or less everything you need. There’s not much that is actually needed but depends on how diverse you want to be as far as what kind of clients you want. There are certain genres that will warrant specific packages and soft synths which may run up to three hundred dollars each or more.

Which professionals would you like to see use MIDI that currently don’t implement it?

No one I can think of. It’s used by most people. There are people however who wouldn’t need to do that like Neil Young for instance. He plays live in the studio and will always want to. I don’t see anyone wasting their careers not using it. If you need it you can use it.

If MIDI is so special, then why doesn’t everyone use it?

Because they tend to think they can bypass it. Some people think it’s a dead technology. I don’t think so. I’ve even heard some audio recording teachers say that. It’s a technology that can still be used to do different things. There are some things like MIDI Show Control which is used for controlling lights and multimedia cues. Disney uses it for certain park rides. So, it’s being used by people that realize its potential but some people don’t want to learn it so they just bypass it and record audio directly, which I think is a big mistake as I’ve said earlier. I mean, MIDI is why I’m still in this business. It has allowed me in my smallest setup early on to make an income because of what I had which other people at the time didn’t have or didn’t know how to use. I’m always appreciative of it and its capabilities. My whole career is based on that. I was originally hired here (at New England Institute of Art) to teach Advanced Computer Music. So, had I not had the prior experience with the rappers doing basic stuff like just sampling and sequencing in the early days, I probably wouldn’t have been hired to teach. This also means I wouldn’t be here to teach all of the other technologies that I’ve learned or kept up with. As an instructor it forces you to keep up with what’s happening. I would have definitely not have been working towards my Masters Degree if I wasn’t in the educational environment. So, it’s all because of MIDI.

How can MIDI be used in live performances?

MIDI can trigger sounds and samples. It can control lights and other events either in a musical sense or in a theatrical sense. There’s MIDI Show Control, MIDI Machine Control. Artists like U2 and Peter Gabriel use MIDI to orchestrate their shows and the multimedia aspects. When shows that are MIDI-based, the drummer has to listen to a click track in the headphones so they can start their songs and keep the song in synch with their sequence and any media that is also synchronized. The lights and the other visuals on the screens are frequently synched through MIDI.

OK, I’ve written a song using MIDI and now I want to record some vocals in the studio. Do I just bring the file with me, do I have to render the individual tracks to audio and then put them into individual Pro Tools tracks? How do I go about doing that?

It depends on if you want to use the sounds you have at home or if you don’t care to use them. You can save it as a MIDI file and bring a very small file into the studio, open it up and just assign those parts to sounds in the studio. So, it’s really easy to do. If you do not have such great quality sounds but you programmed a rhythm and a piano or organ part and have named the tracks then you can say “I’ve got a piano part, what sounds do you have?” and assign it to a channel in that studio. It doesn’t take up much memory and it’s also easy to send them. For example, you can type a speech and send it to me and if I don’t like the font you used I can easily change it and/or its size without a big deal. It’s the same thing with MIDI. You can compose your rhythms and I can totally alter them. So what you gave me is basically a skeleton. I can change the tempo. I can do anything I want with those aspects but still utilize what you pre-produced. It’s very useful that way. You can build tracks and ideas and come into the studio and play back the sounds that another studio has if you like them better than what you have.

I have some soft-synths, are those MIDI and why or why not?

Well, they are MIDI because they’re being triggered to play from MIDI tracks. So you either can assign your parts to internal sounds and the notes you played are being triggered with this information. It’s always going to be MIDI; it’s just a matter of where you’re using your sounds from.

Does equipment for MIDI get old and outdated fast? If I bought a MIDI setup today, how long would it be before I’d have to upgrade?

You just add to it. Old MIDI synthesizers are still useful. Basically it’s the sounds you want to use. What happens is you start to gain a need for diverse sounds and get bored with the others. For example, certain sounds are only useful to a certain amount of diversity so you’ll want to have different types of synths from different companies. Roland and Yamaha and Korg don’t sound the same. So, the more diverse sounds you have, the better you can arrange and the more choices you can offer your clients.

I want to write a song with someone but they’re in India, can I still do this using MIDI and how would I do it?

You just basically compose your piece and save it as MIDI then email it to them and it’s just like a Word document as far as size. So it’s very easy to do. With General MIDI, which is the ability for the other person to hear similar sounds from the tracks, it allows them to hit play and hear it as you wrote it. It’s not the same sound but it’ll be the same instrument. A Roland piano sounds different from a Korg piano but the memory slot will house instruments that are similar. They can then alter or add tracks.

Is a MIDI file something I would give to a record company or a publisher if I was looking for representation?

No. They want the final product so the MIDI file is just the construction of it. That’s only useful for the people that are working on producing the song.

If Bach, Beethoven and Mozart were alive today, what do you think they would think about MIDI?

They’d probably like it for its flexibility and the compositional usefulness of it. In addition to that, they would probably dig things like Sibelius and Finale because it can be altered, transposed, assigned different sounds, doubled or basically anything you want to do.

Do you think that someday, MIDI will become obsolete?

No, I don’t think so. It’s always going to be a basis at least for me. Some people decide not to use it because they’re not trained. I’ll always use MIDI. I don’t see a time that I wouldn’t use MIDI. I don’t have to use it in every single project I do but as far as the basic compositional aspect like building songs from scratch, as a songwriter, MIDI is so useful that it would never not be a part of my life. I can’t speak for everyone because some people don’t know the benefits of it like I do. I don’t see MIDI drying up at all.

OK, I like music but I don’t want to write it so, what else can I use MIDI for?

You can actually do things with MIDI like controlling the lights in your house, the temperature, all remotely. It’s called X-10 technology. Say it’s going to be really cold this afternoon; I’d better turn my heat up. I could actually go to a computer and type into my system to turn my heat up by a certain amount at a certain time.

Do you feel that users of MIDI are respected or are they frowned upon?

It’s become a part of the industry. Earlier on it was frowned upon possibly because the music that was made with it was kind of lame. New Wave music was kind of synthy and some people didn’t like that. Some people didn’t like drum machine sounds. I think now people are just so used to hearing a MIDI string part that they don’t even really want to hear a real string anymore. They don’t like the sound of a real string because they’re so used to that kind of padded, smoother more seasoned tonality of the synthetic ones. When they hear a real violin sometimes they’ll cringe because it’s got too many harmonics. The timbre of it is just to complex for their ears. People have grown accustomed to synthetic sounds. It has to do with the sound quality that we’ve grown accustomed to. People liked the smoothness and the warmth of the analog recording of kicks and snares and bass guitars that when we heard a digital recording, it seemed too harsh. We’re just getting used to that now. We've accepted it.

So there you have it. From the MIDI guru to you. MIDI is a very powerful and useful technology so, Tap into it!