I recently received a question in my inbox asking me
if you as a musician can play a MIDI keyboard without a computer? This sparked my curiosity as to the question’s orgins and who would this answer benefit? The lessons I provide with this newsletter is for music production mostly and artist working in this field . This sometimes takes into account many different kinds of musicians and instrumentalist as well as bedroom composers and producers of music. The focus of this answer was more precise with what the reader was asking, i.e., the MIDI keyboard usage in music today.
The advances in technology has caused quite an impact on performers of all walks of life. I can even go further to say that these technologies have even disruptive how the entertainment industry conducts business on a day-to-day bases.
This new frontier of producers and performers may know much in the way of how music should be distributed and how to get the optimum advantages of the equipment and software needed to produce a new track to the public domain.
This is becoming all too familiar to musicians and artist around the globe. We have the world of Youtube and other spaces where one only to type in the keywords for learning how to use a computer for music production and the possibilities are endless and sometimes overwhelming. I digress.
The information we are seeking today has to do with a very widely know protocol that many musicians still find daunting and a mystery today, what is MIDI? How does MIDI work? Why do we need to know about MIDI anyway?
MIDI, musical instrument digital interface as it is known, has been around almost thirty years and was developed to give musicians more flexible ways of connecting electronic instruments to one another for composition and performances purposes.
Guitarist have their pedals and effects devices to enhance sound and shape their respective instrument into a creative source that made them unique and allowed for more expression. The keyboardist/piano player had little in the way of changing the sound of a say, a Fender Rhodes or a Wurlitzer 200 patches. What you bought you got and the sounds where all that could be enhanced through amplification and effects pedals as a guitar player did when enhancing their sound. The arrival of the synthesizer would change the game of keyboard instruments forever. The keyboardist owning a synthesizer became a solid match for any guitarist now! The guitarist took noticed and learning synthesizer was par for the course if you wanted to add sparkle and shine to your performances or mixes.
I still remember only recently a former Jackson Browne pianist asked me what do I consider myself, a pianist or a keyboardist? My answer was emphatically both and why should I be limited to only one instrument since MIDI makes it possible to have 16 channels of almost every instrument imaginable known to man and/ or woman alike controlled by one MIDI keyboard. This is akin to asking the great Herbie Hancock or Donald Fagen what instrument is the best choice for composing on or with! The synthesizer was placed in studios as a means to give the composer options of expression and sound design choices. The implementation of MIDI was founded on these principles alone. Musicians such as Stevie Wonder and Jean-Michel Jarre made entire albums with the synthesizer as the core musical sounds you would hear and the world became accustomed to the new sounds and shapes offered by these instruments and their performers.
The notion of controlling several different voices and instruments was in affect what MIDI allowed composers to do without having to pay for an entire orchestra or several groups of musicians to interpret what was inside the composers’ mind.
One of these synthesizer creators, Dave Smith invented a polyphonic instrument called the Prophet 600. This synth would later lead to the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 with five voices of polyphony and MIDI connections provided on the back panel. This gave the instrument more depth when connected to other similar synthesizer . You now could connect two or more instruments in tandem and play and perform several at once through one control source, the MIDI keyboard.
Dave Smith is still considered the Father of MIDI and I certainly think he along with other synthesizer designers such as Korg and Roland at the time was stretching the boundaries of our collective consciousness. Musicians do not live inside a vacuum it is said. Collaboration is what makes music great and these visionaries did what was needed to gain more control of expression and sonic variety.
Through five-pin MIDI connections you would enable MIDI devices the option to communicate to each other with specific commands and mapping codes. You could connect samplers, drum machines, and sound modules to one MIDI keyboard and become an entire keyboardist on stage like a wunderkind, the band YES comes to mind along with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. It behooves you to check out these power trios and small groups that created massive sounds with MIDI instruments. Dream Theartre is another bands along with NIN that have learned MIDI’s usage and what it can do to make a band, well a Band! The synthesizer is now an integral part of todays’ music. Everyone is into them and for good reason, everyone should learn how MIDI works. Producer should learn the bases of synthesizers and sound design. We have not seen such an interest in synth since people like Dave Smith arrived on the scene to give us what we as producers need mostly, THAT SOUND.
The conclusive answer to this question is yes, yes, and thanks to Dave Smith and synth goodness YES! One would have to go far back in time to find a keyboard instrument built without the five-pin MIDI outlets and connectors on its back panel. Even some of these pre-1983 keyboards can now be retrofitted to use in todays’ keyboard setups, DAW or Dawless. They can connect to other MIDI instruments and devices as well as the USB connections found on most of todays’ keyboards and synthersizers expanding the polyphony of these instruments MIDI abides and musicians are not only grateful but enriched by MIDI implementations.
I encourage you kittens to learn all you can about MIDI and how it works to make the “Keyboardist” life just a bit easier and fulfilling. Guitarist are welcome and I still find them willing participants in learning synthesizers as much as maybe more so than keyboardist. Five-pin MIDI and USB MIDI can and does work seamlessly into most performers kits and stage presentations. You would be hard-pressed to not find MIDI doing its thang!
Thanks for reading and taking time out of your day to explore the many ways we can get our music heard.
The author wish to thank Dave Smith for his devotion to MIDI and all the great work he has put into making music an enjoyable experience for so many synthesizer players and performers around the world.
All images by Upsplash,respectfully and thanks to MusicRadar.com for the back panel of Dave Smith’s Mopho synthesizer. What a cool synth. You should explore this instrument if given a chance to do so, which also has a desktop equivalent. As they say in the biz, “This little badboy Rocks!”