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Over his career, Anderton has toured and recorded with the group Mandrake, wrote the seminal books Electronic Projects for Musicians and Home Recording for Musicians, foretold the rise of electronic dance music back in 1981, consulted for dozens of companies, and lectured on technology and the arts in 38 states, 10 countries, and in three languages.

Anderton created a mechanically programmable drum machine in 1970, invented multiband distortion, started the first media-rich website devoted exclusively to musicians in 1995 on AOL, and co-founded Electronic Musician magazine. He is currently working on a book series, "The Musician's Guide to Home Recording," for Hal Leonard..

Solve Problems with MIDI Plug-Ins

Solve Problems with MIDI Plug-Ins

A DAW's MIDI Plug-Ins Can Provide Solutions to Common Problems In a world obsessed with audio plug-ins, MIDI plug-ins may not seem sexy—but with MIDI's continued vitality, they remain very useful problem solvers. For an introduction to MIDI plug-ins, please check out the article Why MIDI Effects Are Totally Cool: The Basics. Although processing MID...

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How to Create Polyrhythmic MIDI Echoes

How to Create Polyrhythmic MIDI Echoes

 There's more to life than audio echo – like MIDI echo Although the concept of MIDI echo has been around for years, early virtual instruments often didn't have enough voices to play back new echoes without stealing voices from previous echoes. With today's powerful computers and instruments, this is less of a problem – so let's re-visit MIDI e...

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Mixing with Virtual Instruments: The Basics

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DAW software, like Ableton Live, Logic, Pro Tools, Studio One, etc. isn't just about audio. Virtual instruments that are driven by MIDI data produce sounds in real time, in sync with the rest of your tracks. It's as if you had a keyboard player in your studio who played along with your tracks, and could play the same part, over and over again, with...

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Get Real and Get Funky: How to Create Realistic MIDI Bass Parts

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5 Tricks to getting a great MIDI bass track  1. How to get rid of a hangover  Most bass lines are single notes, and because bassists lift fingers, mute strings, and pick, there's going to be a space between notes. Go through your MIDI sequence note by note and make sure that no note extends over another note's attack (Fig. 1). If two note...

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May 01 Hum a Few Bars, and I'll Fake It

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Celemony Melodyne has one foot in audio, but the other in MIDI because the analysis that it runs on audio ends up being easily converted to MIDI data. If you can sing with consistent tone and level, Melodyne can convert your singing into MIDI. The same functionality for monophonic tracks exists in many DAWs. MIDI data has been extracted from the gu...

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May 31-And the Tips Keep Coming!

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We hope you enjoyed these daily tips during MIDI Month—but that's not the end of it, because there will be plenty more tips to come when you join the The MIDI Association. TMA is an all-volunteer organization that believes in TMA's mission: to nurture an inclusive global community of people who create music and art with MIDI. Our strength is our co...

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May 30-Hands-On Fader Control

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In the tip for May 22, we covered how to control effects and virtual instrument parameters with a footpedal hooked into a synthesizer or other controller. But what if you don't have a synthesizer or other controller...and would rather use a 100 mm fader than a footpedal? No problem, if you're willing to do a little soldering. Take a 1/4" phone jack...

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May 29-Rendering MIDI to Audio

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MIDI has lasted over 30 years, so the MIDI data you entered in a sequencer back in the 80s can still drive today's virtual instruments (which is pretty amazing, come to think about it). However virtual instruments, computers, and operating systems don't have, shall we say, quite the same kind of longevity. You'll be reminded of this when Steven Spi...

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May 28-Manual Vibrato for Keyboards

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The way most keyboard players add vibrato is to turn up the mod wheel, and inject some LFO to change the oscillator pitch periodically. That's fine, but consider guitar players—they add vibrato by moving their fingers on strings, which gives a more human quality than using an LFO. So, try your hand (get it?) at doing vibrato with your fingers inste...

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May 27-Polyrhythmic MIDI Echoes

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There's more to life than audio echo—like MIDI echo. Although the concept of MIDI echo has been around for years, early virtual instruments often didn't have enough voices to play back new echoes without stealing voices from previous echoes. With today's powerful computers and instruments, this is less of a problem so let's re-visit MIDI echo. It's...

Continue reading
4446 Hits