When you send a NOTE ON message to a synthesizer, this note starts playing. MIDI Tutorial Part 3 - Playing notes and chords The VVVVVVV is the release velocity, which is very rarely used. Where CCCC and PPPPPPP have the same meaning as above. The NOTE OFF message is structured as follows: The NOTE ON message then has the same meaning as a NOTE OFF message, switching the note off. There is a special case if the velocity is set to zero. This is practically the case with any real instrument. Indeed, on a real piano, hitting a note harder will not only affect its loudness but also the quality of the sound itself, the timber. In more sophisticated synthesizer, this value will also affect the sound quality. In basic synthesizers, the velocity value is used only to determine the force with which the note is played, the only effect being a note that is louder or softer in volume. When the NOTE OFF message is received, the corresponding note is switched off by the synthesizer. When a synthesizer receives this message, it starts playing that note with the correct pitch and force level. It contains parameters to specify the pitch of the note as well as the velocity (intensity of the note when it is hit). The NOTE ON message is sent when the performer hits a key of the music keyboard. The main messages are the NOTE ON and NOTE OFF messages.
MIDI SOFTWARE
You can also use this MIDI RUNNING STATUS when you generate MIDI messages, but you should care about how the target synthesizer or software will receive it, to be sure it is well interpreted. An example would be a pitch bend or crescendo volume curve.
MIDI SERIES
It is useful for instance to optimize transmission when a long series of the same messages are sent. The STATUS byte is then supposed to be the same as the last STATUS byte received. In such a case, you can receive a message that only has DATA bytes. While reading bytes coming from a MIDI message, you must know that the STATUS byte can in fact be omitted (except in the first message of that type). In the same MIDI cable, up to 16 MIDI channels may be used to control up to 16 different instruments playing independently. In practice, musicians and software refer to the MIDI channels by counting them from 1 to 16, so that there is a difference of 1 when you program them in hexadecimal (channel "1" is coded "0", channel "10" is coded "9" and channel 16 is coded "F").
There are 16 possible MIDI channels, numbered from 0 to 15 in hexadecimal. The number of DATA bytes that follow depend on the type of the message.Įxcept for some system MIDI messages, the STATUS byte contains the MIDI channel number. The STATUS byte determines the type of the message. A STATUS byte has bit 7 set to 1 and a DATA byte has bit 7 set to 0. The first byte is a STATUS byte, often followed by DATA bytes with additional parameters. The MIDI messages are sent as a time sequence of one or more bytes (8 bits). The important point is that the MIDI language does not define the sound itself, but only the sequence of instructions to create the sound in the target synthesizer. Various messages are defined to transmit the information needed to perform the playback of music. " Real time" means that each message is sent exactly at the moment it must be interpreted by the target synthesizer (which can be a hardware synthesizer or software synthesizer). The MIDI language is used to transmit real time information for the playback of a piece of music.
This MIDI tutorial will help you to understand how you can use the MIDI language to control any device that uses the MIDI protocol.