MIDI File Testing – Feedback please?
Several people have requested a MIDI file of my recent cover of Tune 88. I put something together, and updated that post with a link to the MIDI file. However, I’m not exactly sure how you’re all planning to use it, so please try it out and give me some feedback. Is this the kind of thing you want (with bass/drums included)? I opened it in Synthesia (my MIDI file practice tool of choice) and it offered options for which tracks to play, etc. Seemed pretty good.
If you’re a MIDI file user, post some comments as to whether this format will work, or suggestions for changes. I want to provide MIDI files for all of the new groove tutorials — and I’d like to do them in the way which will be most helpful! Some questions to get the discussion started:
- Include the bass/drum backing parts, or would rather just have the piano parts?
- For the piano, does it help for me to split right/left hand into two channels (synthesia can show them in different colors if I do this)
Thanks!
16. July 2010 at 01:27
Hello Jonathan. In my opinion its best to have R&L hands separate (But Im still pretty shaky at the piano) it takes any guess work out. Since synthesia allows the user the option of muting certain channels you can learn the piano parts and then add accompaniment as you improve. Thanks again for you fantastic work.
BK
16. July 2010 at 09:26
I agree with BradK =) Just do the other tracks if you want, and release them in mp3, to not make you too much work ^^
This tune is difficult… I can’t tell now if Synthesia will help =)
16. July 2010 at 12:26
Hi Jonathon. Short answer – I agree with BradK and Schmurze. Long answer – the key thing for me is the score that can be obtained from the MIDI (via my trusty but 13 years old copy of Cakewalk), and the ability to play some bits back at slow speeds to learn. Splitting the hands is best, if possible. As for the bass and drums, I consider them a bonus only in this format. Altogether though, great job and thank you very much. Ian
17. July 2010 at 18:04
I love MIDI files! Your “Tune 88″ opened and played back just fine in Logic Pro.
MIDI is great because you can pull an Aebersold and turn off the piano track when you’re ready to Be The Pianist. You can also load MIDI onto to an iPhone and play in a practice room.
To answer your specific questions:
1. Backing tracks are good. They beat the heck (so to speak) out of a metronome.
2. I am not concerned about a right/left hand split since different folks might split large blocks different ways. But a split doesn’t hurt either.
Keep up the great work! Thanks!
17. July 2010 at 18:10
Ok, thanks for the feedback so far. It’s easy enough to separate the hands, and that sounds like a plus, so I’ll do that for future tracks. This MIDI file was a straight dump of my performance (clinkers and all). For future files, I’ll probably try to do a little cleaning on the file for several reasons:
A) It should render into sheet music better
B) If you’re trying to learn from it, you probably don’t want the mistakes :)
I’ll probably keep the bass and drums (or whatever applies in the future) as it seems easy enough to disable those tracks if you don’t want them, and for some, it’s nice to have.
24. July 2010 at 23:32
Great job on the midi file, Jonathon. Putting together a midi file like that seems very challenging to me. Did you enter all the notes from a midi keyboard? I’ve noticed you use lilypond for notation, and you can output a midi file if you have the song written out in lilypond, of course. Midi sequencing can definitely be a time-consuming process though. Care to share any specifics of how you created the midi file? Have you ever used Rosegarden in Linux before? It’s a nice, open-source midi sequencer (if you can get it to run…). Also, thanks for the hint about Synthesia…cool program!
25. July 2010 at 08:58
Hey Neil! You’re right — Lilypond does spit out a MIDI file, although you have to put some tweaks in to make it “play” all the repeats, etc. That MIDI file has the advantage of being 100% correct to the music — disadvantage is that its very mechanical sounding.
I also put all of backing tracks (bass and drums in this case) together in a sequencer, so I just play the piano part on my keyboard for that. The advantage here — it’s a live capture of just what I played, so it has a much more human feel, and captures dynamics and slight (but important) variations in timing. Disadvantage — it’s not 100% accurate to the music. I also typically go through this file, and manually find all of the left-hand notes and split them to their own channel, which takes a little time, and try and fix any really bad mistakes ;)
I have used Rosegarden and found it to be quite good, especially for ‘pure’ MIDI work. However, I tend to use VST (soft synths) a lot, and my Linux laptop doesn’t have the audio hardware to do that effectively, so I’m currently using Reaper on Windows as my main sequencer. I highly recommend it, if you have a Windows box. Extremely reasonable price if you’re personal/small business. They have Win and Mac OSX versions, so some sort of Linux build or WINE may even be possible…
26. July 2010 at 13:11
Hi Jonathon! It’s been exciting to follow your work on Twitter lately. Your last post (07/26/10) made me real worried though.
I’m on vacation myself right now, i.e. this week I have a lot of spare time to sit by the piano. I was hoping you would finnish the new funk groove before you leave for vacation. Personally I care mostly about the sheet music. From what I can understand notation is done, how about posting it a little bit before all the videos?
Keep up the good work!
/ Seb (sebastianfors[at]gmail.com)
BTW: Where is the donate button?
27. July 2010 at 11:13
Hey @Seb – Did you get my email?
You raise an excellent point… there’s really no reason for me to hold it all back until it’s all ready… I do have some pieces beginning to be done, and they may be useful ahead of time. I’ll start setting up the page where the whole series is going to live, and I’ll start adding the pieces that are done. I’ll post a new entry once I have things available online. I should be able to put the sheet music and MIDI file up immediately, followed closely by the first video or two.