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Looper's Delight
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OK, here's a brief and basic explanation of midi. Midi stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and is simply a language of numbers which allows communication between devices. This can be in the form of various commands or information that tells a particular device such as a keyboard for example, to play a specific note or group of notes, and how to play them. It can also tell effects processors to alter effects or change presets. etc. -or, as you may have heard discussed here, it can be used to send clock or timing messages between various devices to keep them running together. -in synch. Anyway, It's simply based on 16 channels, so if you think of a telephone with 16 lines, with a friend of yours having an identical phone also with 16 lines, you can start to see how midi channels work. If your friend is listening to line 2 on their phone, but you've got line 1 picked up, you won't be able to hear eachother. So, you'd simply switch to line 2, or have them switch to line 1. So with midi devices, you need to tell them ahead of time in most cases which channels to listen to so they can communicate properly with eachother. Does this make sense? Many midi messages depend on this to work. There are some though, such as midi clock, which are sent on all channels at the same time, so regardless of which channel a device may be set to, it can always receive midi clock messages. You may also have seen note messages talked about here, alot. These get sent on a single channel, so as we said above, you'd need to make sure your devices which are using midi to talk to eachother, are set to be on the same midi channel. So, with a note message, a device would just receive in escence, a number, which it would then understand as being a specific note that it should then play. Then, when it receives another note message which tells it to turn off that particular note, it will then terminate it. <smile> -still with me?... One other type of midi message is called a program change message, which is usually used to tell a device to change a patch or program. So, if you have a sound on your keyboard playing, and it then receives a program change message, it will then switch to another sound for you to play. Of course, many devices also use these types of messages in different ways as well, from what we've talked about here. So they can do different things, depending on the device that's receiving them. since, as we said, these messages are just numbers, they can be interpretted as the device is designed to. So, a note message may actually cause a device to perform a function other than playing a note, as with some of the loopers people here use. Since they can't play notes for themselves, they may respond to note messages by performing some other function. Does this make ssense? So, I hope this gives you some idea as to what midi is and what it does. If you have any questions or need me to clarify at all, please don't hesitate to ask, K? Have a great night, and talk with ya on the flip... Smiles, Cara --- View my online portfolio at: http://www.onemodelplace.com/model_list.cfm?ID=52516 -Last updated on Mon. 12.15.03 "The only things I really think are important, are love, and eachother. -Then, anything is possible..." http://home.earthlink.net/~thefates Please visit BadFiction and The Guitar Cafe. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/badfiction http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the-guitar-cafe