Midi

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Disabled Account
Joined 2001
Well I am interested in music.

At home we used to have music on all the time. Either from the radio classical music sessions or request sessions or from records.
Tapes I have very few.
Cd's I have one. Country and Western Patsy Rigger "You remind me of a love song" collection. Very nice

But my main love is....... I have to say this very quietly......midi

Now before anyone shoots me let me explain.

For years and years I built valve amplifiers. Mostly 6V6, KT66 triode connected push pull in an effort to get good sounding sound. I borrowed and made many loudspeaker boxes and connected up Garard 301 with a number of cartridges mostly Ortofon and listened until my ears fell off.

But I never did find the sound I wanted. Something missing. Something I could not find. So I stopped listening.

20 years later I got a computer and did what everyone else does. Surf the net and I found I could download free midi tunes. Then I found I could select from a very large number of midi tunes and started to pay attention to these "midi tunes"

Now I have a collection of several hundred midi's from the 60's-70's era
Most are good. Some are very good and a few are exceptional.
My present stereo is an older model Philips stereo gram. It is made with real wood and sounds reasonable. My computer is connected to it.

I love hearing one person playing all the different tracks and making an old tune come to life. And there are some really good older tunes that you never hear these days. So I can forget about what the sound sounds like because it's not too hot, but the music, now thats a different story. Electronic music stored on an impersonal computer device, downloaded from goodness knows where over narrow band lines and played on a so so stereo but the music is still right there. Just waiting to be heard.

I love my midi tunes.
 
remp,

a close friend of mine is into midi, i guess he also plays them himself. This morning i rubbed his nose into the fact we have a nu music board here. Hoping he finds us.
And you two the introduce me into the beauties of midi .... oops, will need a soundcard for that :)
 
Disabled Account
Joined 2001
Here are a few rather nice midi tunes.

A man without love
Beautiful dreamer Jazz version
Blue xmas
Cherry pink
Your kisses told me
Dr Shivago
Fascination
Help yourself Tom Jones
Jambalia extra good piano work
Spanish eyes. Dont miss this one
 

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Disabled Account
Joined 2001
Dice45

Hard to put vinyl's into a computer.

Get yourself a sound card.

I have Yamaha SP724 pci. Plays GM (general midi) and also XG midi. Not sure if it has a wavetable or just a regular synth. Very inexpensive and extra good sound. Got it connected to the stereo.
 
Plus, if you got a soundcard, you'd get to hear the following on CD and XRCD, respectively:

"Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise"
-John Coltrane Quartet, The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings

"Nardis"
-Bill Evans Trio, Explorations

:D


How does the Yamaha card sound? I'm working on getting GigaStudio and a suitable soundcard so I can hear my MIDIs at their best. The best synths are too expensive, but the GM sets also sound good and are reasonably priced.
 
Disabled Account
Joined 2001
Peter M

The Yamaha has a very nice all round sound. I am not what you might say a discriminating listener but I get a lot of pleasure from the Yamaha sound card. No problem to install and cost me 60 dollars New Zealand which is about 30 US dollars. I am impressed both with the price and the performance..
 
Peter M,

Bill Evans was never my cup of tea. I have one Nardis version of him on an enja record together with Eggi Gomez and Tony Oxley. But i have to play it to remember how it goes. Nothing etched in the synapses of my base brain.

Not so with the Coltrane tune you mention. Of course i know it, :) don't tell your Grandma how to steal Coltrane records .... oops :innocent:... horses :)
Originally issued on impulse A-10 ... and believe me, it has to be the black-orange mono pressing :).
Coltrane is among my absolute undisputed favourites (wrong, he is among my gurus) and i am particularly fond of Coltrane's soprano play. But on this record, before "Softly as in a morning sunrise" there it this tune called "Spiritual", Trane plays it on tenor and Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet. Listening to "Spiritual" makes me cry tears of joy everytime. Not so with "Softly as in a morning sunrise", i like it very much but, to be honest, i prefer the Rollins performance.

The "Softly as in a morning sunrise" from Sonny Rollins is a stunner for me, big fat juicy and really original. And improvsation fits more to the original standard theme.
From the beginners POV: Rollins keeps in touch with the original theme (best observable on Saxophone Colossus, "Blue Seven"), Trane not always ... he seems to orbit away from it.

remp,
i have a soundcard, just to lazy/occupied to properly install it. Tried it once, disappointing. Now i am hunting a soundcard, with all possible inputs to be able to put vinyl to the computer. I need an SPDIF input for harddisk recording. >US$30, i am sure.
 
Disabled Account
Joined 2001
Dice45

Hard to put vinyl's into a computer.

This was my pathetic attempt at a joke. Computers don't have a record player built in.

My Yamaha sound card has a stereo line input for recording from your vinyl's. I have not tried it out but imagine it takes in analogue and stores it on your hard disc as .wav or .mp3 or some other format. Might need helper software.
 
remp,
got your joke :)
.... putting vinyl to the computer via the soundcard's phono input stage is really pathetic. I do not even consider that, got it demoed once, "as a proof how crappy vinyl sounds". What a simple mind :whazzat:, this guy. Sonics indeed were not pleasant.

Now how i want to do it:
have a decent analog2digital converter unit outside the computer and with a separate analog PS, having a properly designed input buffer stage (tube or SS, whatever) and handing out the digital data in SPDIF format (SPDIF is crap for playback but wonderful for recording, the master clock sits piggyback on the ADC chip anyway).

Then the SPDIF is handed to the digital input of the soundcard and no computer-generated RF hash (strayed in or coming via the power supply backdoor) is polluting the audio signal ---because its digital.

### edit dice45 ###
got a bad conscience :guilty:, threadjacking and stuff, could we go back to MIDI? I could pull a copy of the vinyl=>harddisk discussion to the new Musical Instruments board.

### edit2 dice45 ###
Now i have a really bad conscience. :guilty:.. I have failed to meet educative standards.

Did i say it has to be done that way? All i can read and remember is: I want to do it that way.

For the record, i sometimes am not protected form my own prejudices. Among these prejudices: i am afraid, wrong, scared, to use the analog section of a soundcard including the input connectors, electrolytic coupling caps and so on. And i am scared about the radiofrequency hash coupling into that stage. For me it does not matter that much if it's phono MM or line level. I tried line level out ys ago with an old soundblaster AWG32 and did not like it, to put it politely. As it is ys ago, as the used SC is obsolete, as acoustic memory is fading anyway, that's irrelevant.

For the record:
of course it is possible to feed the phono preamp's line signal into the soundcard's line input. Anyone should try that path who wants to try out how vinyl recordings can be harddisk-recorded and post-processed to remove clicks and noise and rumble. It does not cost a fortune and creates 1st experiences and a certain grasp on the topic.
Later on, if vinyl has proven to be an alternative signal source worth considering, one of the next steps could be to build a decent phono preamplifier, to get a better soundcard, to buy or build a decent turntable and so on.
One other option is to use the recorded phono signal for sampling and altering and create new music from it.

To get the phono signal via preamplifier and SC line input on the harddisk, no additional software should be needed. But to get rid of pops, clicks noise, software like Steinberg's Clean! and Syntrillion's CoolEdit are proven to be very helpful without deterioating sonics all too much.
Albeit Clean! is particulary made for that purpose, CoolEdit has the better reputation to leave sonics unaltered. Concerning sampling and altering and working with wave tables , CoolEdit has an outrigth fancy rep considering its price.
So i have been informed by harddisk recording experts.

-----------
Bernhard
 
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