MAKING DUB WITH COMPUTERS - CHAPTER 9: MIDI OR AUDIO?

I couldn't have been giving you most of the examples in this series, if I hadn't used MIDI. In the same time, I can not restrict myself to use only midi when it comes to creating a dub track that I want to release. So it's rather: midi AND audio.  MIDI Midi is a protocol, originally designed in the 1980's to make synthesizers work together. You could play on one keyboard and use the sound of another. Cool, huh? That's what I thought when I first heard if it (not). I thought, what's the use of being able to play note on one keyboard and use sounds of the other. Now, ofcourse, there is not so much use for that, but since the 1990's, it is possible to use midi in a far more sophisticated manner. The keyword in this is called "SEQUENCER".  

As you might have guessed, MIDI is a protocol, that sends notes and other information from one (musical) device to another. It doesn't send the actual sounds, but the notes. Midi information is like: Play A3 for 1 second and three milliseconds. Then wait 300 milliseconds and play G3 for 500 milliseconds. With a sequencer, you can record and playback midi data on several devices. You can record a bass, a drum, and other instruments on different tracks, and play it back. And, very important, you can change the information stored in a sequencer multitrack recording (in short: a midifile). 

In the next chapters I'll write much more about MIDI, but I' would like to leave it here, reminding you that midi records notes and other information, not the sounds. Midi lets the computer record the notes and play it back, optionally after processing the notes in various ways. AUDIO Audio is a lot less difficult to explain, as it's another word for sound. 

When you do audio recording, you are not, like in MIDI, recording the notes, but you are recording the actual sound. Where a midifile can play on every soundcard, it will sound different on every soundcard because of the sounds in the synthesizer. But an audio file will sound more or less the same on every different soundcard. Most known examples of audio files are the WAV and the MP3 files. When you want to make Dub, the audio part is very important, for the art of Dub is, to alter sounds. To make a guitar sound different, not because you play a midi part of a guitar on a piano, but because you can manipulate the AUDIO, the SOUND, of the guitar.  

CONCLUSION: MIDI OR AUDIO? To make Dub on your computer, you need to use the possibilities of both audio and midi. Roughly spoken, you use MIDI to create a riddim, and then you use AUDIO to make a Dub of the riddim. In the next chapters I will elaborate on MIDI, when it comes to creating a riddim.

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