are midi instruments electrical or mechanical?

[ingobert]

are midi instruments electrical or mechanical?

[Ronny]

It's quite simply a computer programme which instructs the sound card on your pc or keyboard to make the relevant noise or play a particular note or drumbeat in pretty much the same way as if you played a note on your music keyboard or typed a letter on the keyboard of your pc this instructs the machine to do the requested action. Obviously there may be hundreds of such instructions going on every second.

:assskake:

[Iman 68]

how I can make my own midi-file? I want to learn to sequence self, but I dont know the programm I must use. I hope, I dont must do this with an right keyboard, becouse my dont like to work with my pc.

Iman

[rdprod]

Midi stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Because you must use elecricity to have anything digital, I would say electrical. However, you must use mechanics , meaning, someone actually has to play the notes, to create a midi file.

[Gandalf]

They are neither Electrical nor Mechanical.

They are Electronic.

Regards
Mr Pedantic

[Kabeem]

A good program to start doing your own sequencing is Finale Notepad.

[cgkb]

www.codamusic.com has finale notepad. It can work on either pc or macintosh.

[The Keeper]

Another way of looking at it. A note is a note when you hold down a note on a keyboard, and stops when you lift your finger off. All a midi note is an on/off switch. The longer you hold the note down for, the longer it goes for. If you have 16 rows(channels) and a different sound on each row, all you have is a lot of on off switches on each row, turning on and off different sounds. It seems complicated, but once you start programming midfiles, it gets addictive. I use cubase, but there are a lot of programs that work just as well

[TonePoet]

It's kind of like a player piano, but the sheet of paper that rolls thru the player is bits & bytes that tell your MIDI componets what to do, & how long to do it.

[caruthers]

All of the above but I think for what you are thinking they are electrical.

[LtDan]

I plug mine in.
It works =)

[ade2055]

i think they are two : electrical and mechanical :)

[jon-paul]

Midi instrument are Not Just a computer program in fact you do not need a computer to run midi instrument. you only need a computer to act as a sequencing suit. However midi does use a binary system to communicate with other midi instrument for example if you press the note C on your keyboard interface this will send a stream of 1 and 0 to the receiving instrument (this could be a sound module or computer or any midi compatable machine) The type of messages from a musical sence are such things as velocity, note on, note off, modulation and Pitch bend to name but a few. Please do not confuse midi with a computer program just remember that midi is not audio but rather a language for comunication.