Been developing #Midi. He's mostly playable! Just got a couple more moves to add, and then he'll be complete, and all that'll be left for Kiki will be to make her #sprites. Then the squirrels will join #Tux and #Konqi in their quest!
Last week @terjefjelde asked me about my #composing techniques, use of #musicTechnology, and thoughts about #musicProduction, and I promised to reply when I had more time. Here’s a too-long thread about this and other things that came to mind…
One thing I do appreciate about #notation software is the playback feature, which can be helpful for judging questions of pacing, or identifying phrases or ideas that need a little more or less time. It also helps me protect against a worst-case, overly literal, unfeeling interpretation—by demonstrating just what that would sound like. If I can get even the #MIDI playback to sound okay, it’ll surely be safe in the hands of a sympathetic human.
4/18
So playback is good for checking pitches and harmonies, pacing, and a robotic reading of rhythm. Surprisingly, it’s not that great for tempo. The tempo at which I hear music in my head is almost always faster than the tempo that feels right when it’s carrying the weight of real sound. #MIDI playback also tends to sound better faster than live instruments do—I guess because it’s also somehow not fully “real” sound.
5/18
And until recently, the timbres available for #MIDI playback have been consistently horrible. That hasn’t bothered me much, because I’ve only ever used it as an aid to aural imagination. Sometimes I even deliberately set the mappings to something cheesy and terrible, so I can’t accidentally get used to the MIDI version and let my imagination get lazy.
6/18
I have no experience at all with #musicProduction techniques developed from the pop side of things. When people I follow here talk about their #mixing and #mastering methods, the effects they use, the gear… I honestly have no idea what you all are talking about. But I’m curious! Because I see a lot of people making polished #recordings at home, using #VST, #MIDI, their own instruments, I don’t know what else—and I’d like to be able to do that too. Where do I start? What do I need to know?
17/18
Digging into the VS1053 synth module in a bit more detail, including some failed patching of a cheap module in an attempt to engage real-time MIDI mode!
I got some good results with the Adafruit Music Maker Feather Wing though.
Figured out how to execute a couple command-line programs from #perl, on my #linux machine, to capture #midi events and immediately issue keystrokes. Partly controlling vim with my music keyboard and my fat .vimrc full of macro things, is a bit cooler now. 😅 ( https://github.com/ology/Music/blob/master/capture-midi ) \o/
I'm Kevin, diyelectromusic in most places. I do MIDI and microcontroller based making, often reinventing wheels just to learn how it is done and writing it all up on my "Simple DIY Electronic Music Projects" blog trying to link music and STE(A)M: https://diyelectromusic.wordpress.com/