I have kinda taken an interest in digital/MIDI music lately. Just window shopping, I noticed something though: many lower-priced (-$300) keyboards have MIDI interfaces, and pre-loaded MIDI voices, , -and there’s lots of mixing software that can manipulate the parameters of an existing MIDI, but how does you make one?
Probably related:
Where do MIDI files come from?
From the Internet of course
Okay, enough joking. There are two main ways.
a. Painstaking entry of each track, note by note. I’ve only used Cakewalk pro and it’s a beee-yitch. Not at all fun. Perhaps other programs are easier to use.
b. Play the notes in using your keyboard or other MIDI instrument. But… First, you have to be good. Second, you still have a lot of editing to do, not unlike method a.
In principle you can also use a scanner and a sheet music recognition program. There are also some weak attempts at converting from digital music to notes.
As to sampling. Basically, MIDI has not taken off like it could have. How many people bought Amigas after all? So a lot of MIDI related hardware has not seen the widespread use, production and ensuing price drop. Also, a lot of the real work has moved from the synths (which you need for sampling based music) to the PC. Standard consumer grade cheapo sound cards just aren’t suitable for real music. Pro gear is at a whole 'nother price/performance level. Get some Keyboard/Electronic Music magazines and check the ads and reviews.
Generally a MIDI composer would use a comination of manually entering the notes and playing a keyboard. I think what most do is play a rough approximation of the composition on their keyboard, then go over it and edit it, insert the correct instruments, etc.
On a Mac, you can use a GUI MIDI program that lets you drag a bar the width (duration) at the height (frequency) of the note you want to put, and then assign it a voice. (Usually you have to pick from a menu of Voices that are specific to this composition, and those voices in turn can be any of the large pool of recognized MIDI instrument voices). You can use QuickTime Musical Instruments (part of the standard OS install package) as your “MIDI instrument” for hearing the note and instrument and for general playback, or you can hook one or more real MIDI instruments and select those instead.
I’m a little out of touch with the current state of the art; the last s/w I used to make my own MIDI compositions was MIDIgraphy, a freeware item courtesy of a Japanese MacOS hacker who left some elements rather unfinished. (I had to import the piece into MoviePlayer to assign the instruments and then export it back out as MIDI to continue editing in MIDIgraphy. And the overall tempo in beats per second could not be set in MIDIgraphy either, so I had to use a positively antediluvian copy of Musicshop that dated back to the Mac Plus era to open the file, set the tempo, and save changes / quit if I wanted to speed up or slow down the piece). Despite these PITA insufficiencies, I found the overall GUI wonderful to work with. Selection just like selection in a graphics program, with copy and paste to a later point in the composition to duplicate a sequence; drag to the right to move the selection to a few microbeat’s later in time, or up to raise the pitch one or more halftones, etc.
