Standard MIDI Files

If you play a steady club gig, adding fresh songs to the set list is part of keeping your audiences happy. But doing new arrangements is a lot of work. I’ve gotten good results in less time using downloadable MIDI files.

MIDI files are especially useful if you’re doing a solo act or backing a singer in a duo or trio. The keyboard player is often expected to fill in all of the missing parts, and sequence playback is often part of the gig.

The quality of downloadable files varies wildly, from stunning to hopeless. Some of the better materials come from commercial sites such as TranTracks (www.trantracks.com), but thousands of files are available for free — just Google “MIDI files” and you’ll be off to the races.

Except for the classical music, most free MIDI file downloads are technically illegal. But if you’re using the songs in a club, the copyright owners stand to make money from performance royalties through ASCAP and BMI, so I feel these files are a legitimate resource for gigging musicians to use.

Almost any file you download will need a little tweaking, or more than a little. Here are some practical tips for turning the raw data into real music.

PREPARE THE DATA

Most MIDI files are meant to be played by General MIDI (GM) synths. Each track will have some header data that sets up the synth to play the intended sound on a particular channel. Many instruments today have a GM-compatible soundset but also hundreds of other sounds. In order to experiment with switching to other sounds, you need to get rid of the header data.

If the file arrives as a single multichannel track, make 16 copies of it and align them vertically on separate tracks in your sequencer. Then use your sequencer’s logical editing commands to erase everything on a given track except the data on one channel.

Play the sequence once — the first few bars will do. This should switch the synth so that each multitimbral part is assigned the intended sound, such as bass or organ. Depending on the features of your synth, you may want to save the multitimbral setup at this point. If the sound is a total mess, don’t get discouraged quite yet. You may also want to name the tracks based on the preset assigned to each.

Open up the MIDI event list for each track and delete the stuff at the head of the track (see Figure 1). Once you’ve gotten rid of the program change and the mix control data in the header, you’ll be free to improve the multitimbral setup by loading your own favorite presets. Electric piano, bass, and strings are prime candidates for replacement.

Many of the files I’ve checked out have too much reverb. Dialing back the effects sends in the synth’s mixer will fix this. Some parts may be too quiet or too loud. Small adjustments in the mixer will give you a better balance. Some may be in the wrong octave — easy to fix.

General MIDI sequences almost always have the drums on channel 10. If you hear a weird rhythm pattern on piano, but no drums, switch the synth part on channel 10 to a GM drum kit. I usually make several copies of the drum channel data on different tracks (all of them, at this stage, still assigned to channel 10) and then erase pitches from the various tracks so that the kick is on one track, the snare on another, the hi-hats on a third, and so on. This lets me swap in new drum sounds and adjust the drum notes’ velocities more easily.

GETTING SERIOUS

By now you should be able to tell whether the sequence is worth working on, or whether it’s not salvageable. If you decide to proceed, your next stop should be iTunes. Almost any song in the world (with the exception of the Beatles catalog) is available on iTunes for 99 cents.

Buy the original recording and A/B it against the MIDI sequence. This will reveal details that you can polish. The downloaded file may have incorrect chords or isolated wrong notes. Important sound effects may be rendered badly by the GM sounds, so you may need to hunt for replacements.

When I started working on Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” I had a great MIDI file as a starting point, but I noticed that a couple of trumpet turns were missing from the main horn line, and pitch-bends were needed in the sax at another spot. If I hadn’t checked against the original, I would have missed these details. The bass part was more staccato than in the original, so I lengthened many of the notes by hand.

The final step is to add your own creative spark. Get rid of that hokey fadeout ending (MIDI handles fadeouts badly) and add a snappy cadence. Toss in a few drum fills or bass licks. Add 16 bars in the middle for a short instrumental solo, or a modulation before the last verse. If you love classic tunes as much as I do, you’ll be excited by the results you can get this way with only a few hours of work.

JARGON JOCKEY

• General MIDI: A standard set of synth sounds and related features. GM was originally intended to provide compatibility among instruments from different manufacturers. While it never quite lived up to that promise, it’s still widely used as a format for MIDI sequence files so that they can be played with reasonable fidelity and confidence that the sounds will be similar enough on various instruments.
• Logical editing: A utility in MIDI sequencers that allows MIDI events to be selected according to certain criteria (such as type, channel, pitch, velocity, or note length) and edited in various ways — deleting, adjusting velocity or length, and so on.