General Midi – not quite dead yet?

If you don’t know what General Midi (GM) is, you’re missing out on something which is at the time time both very awful and very cool. General Midi is a specific specification for synths, that basically means the the default synth on your soundcard or operating system should theoretically have the same instrumentation as mine. So, instead of having to save a big audio file, I can save a little set of midi instructions, and your GM synth will follow these instructions and play back the notes of my song with the drum parts sounding like drums, squarewave sounding like a square wave, and the pineapple tasting like a pineapple, and of course the schnozberry tasting like schnozberry. It’s awful it really is.

The big advantage of MIDI files, is they’re a tiny tiny size. Like, really really tiny. And the big disadvantage, is that the song will only sound as good as the MIDI module playing it back, and only sound as good as MIDI. I have Microsoft GS Wavetable SW synth playing back my MIDI files, and gosh, they sound so bad. Really, like, bad tacky computer game music from the 90′s…. Which is great because that’s exactly what I plan to use MIDI for. Tacky computer game music is secretly incredibly cool.

You can find MIDI files all over the net for use as backing tracks for playing guitar over or karaoke, or if you’re a real masochist you can even just download MIDI songs to listen to. You know, if you really hate yourself that much…

Here’s just a quick little thingamee I chucked together while trying to figure out how to get the whole MIDI thing to work. I made the file in Cubase, but I must have been doing something daftly wrong because it kept coming out with all the instruments sounding like a piano. Which annoyed me something wicked. So I imported it into a super little program called Anvil Studio to save the instrumentation. Anvil studio is free – and totally anti-intuitive to use (hence me only using it after Cubase repeatedly failed me). But it’s free, so yay for that anyway

Click to hear my fab tacky midi file