Live Instruments with MIDI, Make MIDI Work for You

With the advent of MIDI becoming fast, easy, and cheap, I hear a lot of people's home recordings filled to the brim with MIDI sounds and instruments. MIDI has changed the way we record and will continue to, but is it really a good thing? 


For those of you who don't know what MIDI is, it is Musical Instrument Digital Interface. In short, it is a way to take electronic signal and convert into a piece of data that tells a plug-in to a play a sound when triggered. This means anyone who knows how to play a keyboard can basically play any instrument ever made. It can also be used for sequencing which is the same process except that you "write" the notes in on the computer, making even knowing to play a keyboard unnecessary. To most this idea sounds great. I can play any instrument without having to know how to actually play it? Yes, but should you?


In the case of a low income studios or home studios, MIDI is great for creating instruments too difficult to record in a small space or with a lack of gear to accommodate. But now what we're getting into is overkill. Many hip hop tracks and rap tracks feature no musicians, other than the rapper or singer. What you get out of this digitalized process is stale, overused sounds again and again. Even worse than this is a song that has great sounding MIDI tracks and horrible sounding live tracks. Often I come across tracks where the drums sound great because they're not real and the vocals sound terrible because they didn’t know how to record live musicians well.
 
It has always been my theory that MIDI is last resort or only there to add to the live instruments. In this case there are tons of new plug-ins and tricks to help you use MIDI to your advantage. Here's just a few.


Add MIDI Sounds Behind Real Ones


On a track I recently worked on, we decided that we want a choir during the chorus to really fill out the mid section and give full feeling to chord progression. Obviously we don't have a choir at our disposal so we had to make due. Most people would then pull up a MIDI choir then sequence or play in a chord progression and leave it. Anyone who doesn't have an eight thousand dollar choir samples knows, they all sound terrible. Instead we recorded a couple of us singing the main lines and layered over and over again to make 4 people sound like a choir. Then we put a MIDI version of the progression low, behind the makeshift choir to fill out voices we didn't have. Now what you're left with is choir that has real human elements and full sounds without ever having to record a full choir, but also not resorting to an awful sounding MIDI choir. East West has some great samples that don't break the bank too bad and we have a great time using. I’d recommend them for almost any situation.


Use MIDI Samplers for Drum Replacement

Common practice now is to replace certain parts of your drum kit with samples and this is a newer technique I couldn't agree more with. Using samples for your kick and snare are usually essential, especially in rock and metal. The great thing about this is that your whole kit otherwise, is usually real. Most of the time, for a more human element, you can layer the sampled sounds over the real ones to add differences to the samples. The best drum sounds I've come across so far is Toontrack's Superior Drummer. It has amazing sounding samples and works great just for demo-ing out things where all MIDI isn't an issue. Superior drummer is a little expensive but worth every penny. If it's still too much, Toontrack's EZDrummer has more modestly priced options. Another great plug-in for this is Drumagog. It does drum replacement in real time and saves some serious time if you've got the processing power.


Make Your Own MIDI 


Most modern DAW's allow you to assign your own samples to MIDI notes. This a great technique for a lot of reasons. If you're creating your own drum samples you can record each drum specifically and get exactly the sound you want out of your own drums. You can "record" your set even if you don't have the means to record it all at once. The great thing about spending the time making great samples is other people want them. You can sell a sample library and good ones go for quite a lot of money. 


By no means do I hate MIDI and I don't want to make it sound as if that's the case. I think it a commodity that is being overused in the wrong applications. MIDI is great for assisting your recordings and helping add to the sound, but it shouldn't be your whole sound. Hopefully these tips can help you use it in more creative ways.