A guitarist friend of mine plays with a bassist and vocalist and told me that to fill in the other parts (drums, keyboard etc) when the band are playing he uses backing tracks in MIDI format along with a MIDI box to actually make the noise. Since I can do the same on my computer (and so can anyone else with soundcard/speakers) I figured that someone else must ahve thought of this before me. Searching the internet, however, turned up nothing.
So does anyone know of a site where such MIDI files can be obtained? Or is there a copyright issue which prevents them being put on the net?
I play along on my banjo with MIDI files all the time. If you fork over a few bucks for a decent MIDI editor/player, you can do Useful Things such as mute tracks and vary the tempo. I use Power Tracks Pro from http://www.pgmusic.com , which was around $30.
Also, I’ve found that the sound cards that come with PC’s from the factory are mostly pretty poor when it comes to MIDI, because the instruments sound like something from a cheap video game. Unfortunately, I’m back to using this right now because I lost* my SoundBlaster AWE32.
I don’t know your style of music that you’d like to play, but I have found many of the ones I use at http://www.banjo.com/BG-Midi.html .
How could I lose a sound card? I had to restore my PC from the original CD, so I removed the sound card while I did that. Later, I couldn’t find it. It must have gotten thrown away.
Regarding high quality midi.
If you are willing to devote 50-80% of a PII’s resources to making beautiful music, TiMIDIty is the way to go.
Get the large wav patches, the ones at least 10MB in size.
The difference in sound is really incredible. I can’t describe it, but it’s worth the extra CPU crunching.
There are a lot of sites devoted to explaining its installation and setup. Run a search on Google.
A lot of them are in Japanese, though.
