Part 4
Hello friends!
In this post I will tell you about devices that will make your life easier in the future. I am talking about MIDI keyboards and MIDI controllers.
I will try to explain in a nutshell what are they. Usually musicians use different instruments. Let us say a pianist is playing a grand piano or a piano or a synthesizer by taping black and white keys. We hear this instrument and understand what the musician is playing. A person at a computer who wants to write music must enter information about the notes in one way or another. The easiest way that comes to mind is using a regular computer mouse. It is long, dreary process, and it will not develop yourself as a musician.
The simplest thing to ease the process is a MIDI keyboard. A MIDI keyboard is a device that contains a black and white piano keys and a MIDI interface through which this keyboard is connected either to a computer with a library of virtual instruments or to synthesizers or sound modules. By itself, it does not reproduce sounds, the MIDI keyboard converts the pressed keys into specific MIDI commands that are processed by the devices connected to it. For example, we can load any instrument, say a piano into the computer and use this MIDI keyboard to play the sounds of this piano. Or any other instrument. Even a harp if you like. Convenient, isn't it? And even if you are not a pianist, with certain skills and diligence, everyone can play anything to a certain degree.
The MIDI protocol itself is quite complex. With the help of it, quite a lot of types of commands are transmitted, and we will not consider getting into details within the framework of this article. In the future, we will periodically come across certain settings and will study them in greater detail.
There are many types of MIDI keyboards. From simple and compact, to large, piano-style with a huge number of additional controls in the form of pads and encoders that can be programmed to use the controls of virtual instruments. Among professionals, very popular keyboards by Fatar. They are quite expensive and, in the future, with your further development as a musician, can be considered as a good investment. Now, I would suggest a several options that are suitable for an aspiring composer.
2. Nektar SE25
MIDI controllers on other hand are a specific devices that help us in our creative work. They are a logical development of MIDI keyboards for a specific types of music instruments, such as a keyboard, string, brass, or percussion. They allow to transmit, all the subtleties (strokes) of these instruments, making them sound lifelike.
There are MIDI devices, which are like studio mixing consoles, that allow to mix your composition to perfection. There are many other types of devices with different purpose to make composers life easier. Do we need them now? Probably not. But it does not hurt to know about them.
This concludes the hardware part. In the next post, I will talk about software, and specifically to our DAW (Digital Audio Workstations). We will use them to create a first project.
Stay tuned…
Andru (Namaste) Shaitar
webdisweb@gmail.com
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