MIDI Fundamentals Reviewed - Part 2

We continue with the process of napkin-to-CD by starting the MIDI recording process by first recording some kind of MIDI piano/rhodes scratch track.

Before that, the next detail you need to address is that you want any lead vocals to be sung into a mic for real time monitoring, but not recorded so the accompanying musician can easily tell where they are in the song.

As mentioned above, let's say your one, and only scratch track is some kind of MIDI keyboard. It could be MIDI guitar, I suppose. The issue to consider is that you want to be able to monitor that track in silence, i.e. you don't want any other sounds bleeding into the vocal track. Having said that, the keyboard part should probably be played as if they were playing the same part they would play if the rest of the band was playing. This, as opposed to a rhythm, and/or bass (in the left hand), or with melody since you have a lead vocalist anyway.

Once you have this and the drum track laid down, you need to lay down the bass track. Then, of course, if you have a MIDI guitar, or MIDI-based rhythm guitar software it's time to lay down the rhythm guitar, and rhythm ONLY. Finally, if you have any other keyboard/synth tracks (if the synth part is a rhythm part only), and/or percussion tracks lay them down now. Again, with percussion, if you want to replace these MIDI parts with real percussion later on, that's fine; however, it may offer a lot of rhythmic reference to assist the other musicians where they are. That's your call. Once you've finished refining this mix, you may want to take about a five hour break, or maybe even 24 hour break just so your ears don't get fatigued.

At this point, I need to remind you to quantize EVERYTHING...YES! EVERYTHING to absolute zero. This means you have to know the right numbers that correspond to the intervals between notes like quarter, eighth, sixteenth, and other notes. To do this you need to establish how many ticks there will be between each beat. The default is 120, so there would be 480 ticks per bar, but in the software you always count from 0 to 119, where 0 is the beginning of the beat. For instance, in 4/4 (or any time signature that uses 2 eighth notes per beat) the upbeat (or “te”) falls on tick 60, and the 2 16^th notes on either side of that 8^th note would fall on 30, and 90. So, if you're using M:B:T time display, and looking on the Event Edit screen (which not all DAWs have) it would look like this:

001:01:000

001:01:030

001:01:060

001:01:090

001:02:000

...and so on.

Obviously, as the notes get faster there's fewer ticks between each note. I'll get into this concept in more detail in a later blog. So, to hint you along, you may want to slow the tempo down to a crawl, and look in the Event Edit screen to see what notes are where. Then, you may need to nudge them 2,3,4 ticks one way or the other. Most of the time you can simply choose 100% quantize, and it will place the notes quite properly. Other times not so muchy. So, save your work whenever you're doing this. This brings up another critical detail. Be ABSOLUTELY sure you set your preferences to Auto-save every 5 minutes.

After quantizing everything, spend some considerable time getting this mix as close to the way you want it. This includes any MIDI FX like MIDI-based compression, or delay, as well as using any onboard synth reverb FX, etc. Save the project again. After you save, start working on any horn, and/or string section parts. Once you have added any string or horn parts in, take another break maybe, then mix the totality of the parts.

You have now finished the MIDI portion of your project. We will continue on with the blog series portion that will include converting all of the MIDI parts into WAV files, then mixing those into submixes, vocals, and finally full mix.