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S1E22 – How Easy MIDI Makes It

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  • How to Use a MIDI Keyboard [COURSE]
  • The Best MIDI Keyboards for FL Studio

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    Home/Podcast/S1E22 – How Easy MIDI Makes...

    After receiving MANY questions about how to use a MIDI Keyboard in FL Studio to make beats, I decided to put together a couple resources for you.

    This podcast episode discusses how powerful MIDI is for us producers when it comes to being able to edit our notes with tools like velocity, note-nudging, swing, and various other tools..

    These are the basics fundamentals we beatmakers need to know.

    You can learn about how to make amazing drum loops with MIDI through my teaching curriculum called SAFE SPOTS.

    Drum Kits MIDI Controller MIDI Keyboard MIDI Notes Virtual Instrument

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    Transcript

    S1E22 – How Easy MIDI Makes It

    1. Hey, this is Gratuitous. Welcome to Music Production Made Simple, the show that
    2. focuses on best practices about music production, which is based on FL Studio.
    3. If you're wanting to become the best producer you could be, subscribe and listen
    4. weekly. You can also check out my courses, which teach you the principles and basics
    5. of music production, they'll get you up and running quickly.
    6. In addition, I also have books on Amazon and tons of music on Spotify.
    7. Always feel free to hit me up at Hi at itsgratuitous.com.
    8. So let's get into the episode.
    9. Alright, hey, what's everybody?
    10. Welcome to episode number 22. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about how easy
    11. MIDI makes beat making. For those of you who are not aware, MIDI has
    12. made beat making so easy. We have it so like we have it so easy as beatmakers
    13. nowadays compared to before MIDI was around and even in like the early stages of
    14. MIDI. Nowadays we have VSTs, you simply load up like your silence one serum, and you
    15. can simply just play your keys and you can instantly generate sounds, instantly
    16. instantly start recording. So over the past little you know, couple weeks here, I've
    17. actually been reading further into MIDI, trying to study it more at a at an advanced
    18. level. And what I discovered is there's actually a MIDI specification, which these
    19. companies follow. You can actually go to MIDI's website and download the
    20. specification. You have to create an account, but it's free to download like the
    21. spec. And as you read into it, you kind of start to see, you know, how MIDI
    22. works. it's just you know, that's more of like the advanced level.
    23. You don't need to know it that at that level.
    24. So before we get further on into the episode, I just want to share that I've been
    25. receiving amazing reviews from a lot of you on a lot of my courses, you know, on
    26. Skillshare and Udemy and stuff like that.
    27. So I just want to say thank you.
    28. That positive feedback is just you know really, really encouraging.
    29. And so for those of you who are not sure if you want to take my courses or where to
    30. find my courses, I have them on a whole bunch of websites, but the best way to take
    31. them is just through my own website, it's gratuitous.com.
    32. You guys can sign up for $10 a month, access all the courses.
    33. There's no contract, you can cancel at any time..
    34. Or you guys can always just purchase the individual course through my website as
    35. well But just want to say thank you for the awesome reviews to a lot of these
    36. courses. Okay, so my understanding of why MIDI started up
    37. was because in the early stages of you know all this gear, music production gear,
    38. all these companies kind of started to have like their own standards.
    39. And this became a problem when you know, once you started to work with like one
    40. company's like let's say keyboard, and you want to like maybe plug it into some kind
    41. of sound module or whatever. and you know, they just have different terminology,
    42. different approaches to how to you know how to do stuff, or maybe how to keep the
    43. actual equipment in sync. You know, like I said, nowadays we just have a music
    44. program, we have it so easy, but back in the day there was all these hindrances in
    45. order to actually make you know music and make beats.
    46. So from my understanding, MIDI was born because of you know these companies, and
    47. you know, they're kind of like we need a standard, and that's where MIDI came out.
    48. And MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface, and in simple terms, it
    49. just allows you to play, you know, on a keyboard, and it just is able to save that
    50. information into a digital format inside your computer in a relatively similar way
    51. to how you played it, in a sense of what note, how you know how fast you press that
    52. note, in a sense, you know, for like the velocity and stuff like that.
    53. Okay. So MIDI has come out as a standard, and now it's allowed all these companies
    54. to create equipment to you know, this the specific MIDI standard that now it doesn't
    55. matter what you know, MIDI keyboard you have, you can be with like MAudio or Akai or
    56. you know, any brand, and it's all going to integrate.
    57. so it just allows the process of all of this to be so much easier..
    58. Now, in the early stages of like music production and MIDI, it was still a little
    59. little bit clunky Like you know, nowadays, like I'm saying, we have the VST, we
    60. simply load up and a lot of us take it for granted.
    61. But you know, you used to have to have like the old school like MIDI cables, they
    62. kind of look like an XLR cable a little bit, but I think they have like five pins.
    63. A lot of times you have to go all on like a MIDI out into like the MIDI in of like a
    64. sound module. The whole process of getting a MIDI keyboard having an outboard sound
    65. module that you would like plug into a rack, it's just like you know, for workflow
    66. and everything nowadays, it's like that is you know, that's like in like the
    67. dinosaur age. It's like if you're still working that way, it's because maybe you
    68. have like you you kind of love like the hardware and stuff like that.
    69. But in my opinion, it's honestly you do not want to be going that route anymore.
    70. You want to be all inside the computer so that you know if you have to go to
    71. different studios or if you're traveling around, it's all inside your laptop or it's
    72. all inside your computer, and it makes it that much easier.
    73. You can easily just kind of open up a project, recall it on the fly.
    74. you can send it to somebody, and it saves all this information.
    75. Okay. So, you know, what MIDI is is like nowadays, you know, back in the day, like I
    76. said, it was like the MIDI cable.
    77. It was like a five-pin cable, you plug it in, and you know, that was able to
    78. interact with whatever gear you're working with.
    79. Nowadays, USB is MIDI. Okay, so you simply just plug in your your USB cable, and
    80. that is MIDI. Now, a big confusion when I first started up was I thought that like
    81. my MIDI keyboard was gonna have sounds built into the actual keyboard, but it
    82. doesn't work that way. So on your actual keyboard, it's used to actually control
    83. your program where your sounds are, and you know, you can hit stop, play, record,
    84. all that kind of stuff with MIDI, you know, like so.
    85. When you actually push down the down a note, that registers like note on, and then
    86. when you let go of the note, it registers like note off.
    87. And that's just telling you know the VST or like the sound module to turn off or on
    88. like that note, and then again, like depending what note you hit, it also registers
    89. that number. different notes have a registered like different numbers or same with
    90. different knobs. But one of the biggest things that MIDI has allowed us to do is
    91. edit our notes after we've played them.
    92. Okay, so you know, if you want to actually change the note, if you want to change
    93. the length, if you want to change, you know, the velocity, so like how loud that
    94. note was played. All that stuff is available to you inside your music program, and
    95. that's all thanks to MIDI. I just wanted to bring to your awareness that how easy it
    96. is nowadays to make beats with MIDI.
    97. It really has allowed like anybody to make music.
    98. You know, back in the day, you you actually needed to kind of know how to play your
    99. instrument to make music. You couldn't just kind of pick something up and just kind
    100. of you know play with it. Nowadays with MIDI, it's like you know, as long as you can
    101. kind of get something kind of going, it's just a matter of using your mouse,
    102. clicking around, and trying to find different melodies.
    103. You know, you open up a different VST, get a different sound, and you just start
    104. building off of that process. You know, you start loading up different effects now,
    105. and you can kind of start tweaking that.
    106. And I'm just super grateful as I was reading into like the MIDI specification, just
    107. kind of watching various tutorials on YouTube about like you know, like the actual
    108. like what is MIDI? Where did it come from, and why do we need it?
    109. And again, it's just made this standard.
    110. you know, in a lot of industries, there's still like that's you know, something's
    111. always missing. Something's kind of struggling in between these, you know,
    112. different. companies for them to all come together to work together, and then they
    113. can kind of build their own product
    114. Like, for example, in front of me right now, I have an axiom, you know, it's by it's
    115. an axiom keyboard, a MIDI keyboard, it's just by M Audio, it's an older MIDI
    116. keyboard. But this keyboard, you know, it's just like that's their product, and it's
    117. gonna work great with FL Studio.
    118. If you were to go with a different company's MIDI keyboard, that MIDI keyboard is
    119. going to work great as well because it's just it's just MIDI.
    120. We're now able to control our notes and a sense of length, volume, what note we
    121. actually want to play, if you want to transpose from one key and scale to another
    122. key and scale. It is, you know, it's a very, very fast process.
    123. So that's pretty much all I just wanted to talk about in this episode is just how
    124. easy MIDI has made it to make beats.
    125. It is absolutely amazing. You know, everything is just in sync again back in the
    126. day. If you had like a drum machine and a sound module, you know, you had to kind of
    127. set all this stuff up in a sense of all these different MIDI channels.
    128. you know, the information that you want to send on one channel into like you know, a
    129. sound module. but it's like, you know, we don't even have to know that stuff
    130. anymore. It it is, it's honestly just you plug in your USB cable into your computer,
    131. load up your VST, record your actual parts, and then you know, pretty much your MIDI
    132. keyboard is done with you're on to like the mixing stage, goes into the mastering
    133. stage, and you know, you're you're done.
    134. You have your song. When you look at these industries further on, you know, like
    135. like when they first started, and you kind of look at like the kind of growing
    136. pains, it's like we're past those growing pains.
    137. We're we're we're into like the real easy part of making music.
    138. Probably like one of the biggest hindrances in digital music right now is probably
    139. the audio interface and the audio latency.
    140. You know, a lot of these companies they're always promising like zero latency and
    141. stuff like that. I do have to say that you know, in the newer generations of these
    142. audio interfaces, the audio latency has improved a lot.
    143. it's really really awesome. But in a sense of your MIDI keyboard and making your
    144. beats, that is, you know, that's your bread and butter right now.
    145. Like that's super easy, just a matter of, you know, hit your notes, record your
    146. parts, and you're on your way.
    147. So that's all I want. All I wanted to talk about was just you know, MIDI.
    148. I'm gonna be actually creating a MIDI course here soon.
    149. You know, not not anything super in-depth, but a lot of people have asked me
    150. recently. I have a little chat little tool there on my website.
    151. And a really really common question people ask me is like, hey, can you make a
    152. course on how to use my MIDI keyboard to make beats?
    153. So, you know, that kind of sparked this idea of like, well, I want to learn more
    154. about MIDI and you know, more in depth of like what you can do with it.
    155. I will be working on that course here pretty soon.
    156. but yeah, so just MIDI makes it super easy.
    157. it is pretty intense if you start reading into it and just kind of how it works.
    158. But again, you don't really need to know that to make beats.
    159. You literally just need a MIDI keyboard in your music program, a sound you know,
    160. like a VST, and you're pretty much on your way.
    161. So again, if you guys want to check out my FL Studio courses, they're not just you
    162. know for FL Studio users. I do just teach kind of like the basics of music
    163. production and like the principles and everything.
    164. Just come to my website, it's gratuitous.com, or you know, my my courses are on
    165. various other websites, such as like adsr sounds.com or Born to Produce, and like
    166. Skillshare, you to me. But yeah, like you know, I really appreciate if you'd come to
    167. my website to take these courses.
    168. that way, you know, I receive you know a hundred percent of the profits..
    169. So thanks for listening I'll talk to you guys in the next episode.
    170. Thanks for checking out the episode.
    171. If you had any questions, visit it'sgratuitous.com slash podcast, select an episode
    172. and submit your question at the bottom of the page to the contact form.
    173. If you'd like to take my FL Studio courses, see my current studio and podcasting
    174. gear, read my books, or are interested in lessons, visit the link it'sgratuitous.com
    175. slash learning. That page will redirect you to more info and resources.
    176. I hope the best with your productions.
    177. I'm gratuitous, and I'll see you in the next
    178. episode.
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