MIDI » Kristie Addison

New Toy – Yamaha CLP-230 Digital Piano

Gear Reveiw, MIDI, Piano, Song Writing 4 Responses »

May 032008

I have been dying to get a Piano for a while now, however with the stairs, and the tuning, and the space it just hasn’t proved practical. But I’ve been also needing a new MIDI controller Keyboard. Mine is only two octaves, and a few notes don’t work so good after the coffee incident… So I found a good medium point. A fairly decent digital Piano. I didn’t go overboard and get one with all the bells and whistles since I’m going to be using it with my computer anyway. It has a great Piano sound and feel, a USB port, and who needs anything else?

It has a GH3 Keyboard which has different weightings on the hammers, so the action is heavier in the lower end of the keyboard and lighter in the high end making it very realistic to play.

Within minutes of setting it up I found myself writing this piece. Apologies for my rusty playing – I haven’t lived with a piano since moving out of my parents house about ten years ago, so I have a lot of practicing to catch up on

Attack of the Meeplings.. Meep Meep!

Games, MIDI 6 Responses »

Mar 242008

The Beta version of a game I’ve done music for has just come out. The game is called “Attack of the Meeplings” And is a cute neo-retro bullet dodge arcade style browser based game. Well, that’s how I’d describe it I guess It’s made by TinyFrog Software, and the game can be found at http://www.tinyfrogsoftware.com/aotm/

The music I did is done with General Midi, which was a challenge in itself. I think I already blogged a little while back about rediscovering the joys of MIDI, and while MIDI is a little outdated,and quite restricting, is does have some advantages. Because Attack of the Meeplings is a browser based game, it’s preferable for it to have a small file size for fast download. MIDI file sizes are ridiculously tiny, so ideal for this sort of thing. The other advantage we had with MIDI in the case of this game, is the fact that you can change the BPM. The game starts off with the music playing at 140BPM, and as the game speeds up with each level, the music plays faster and faster. Unfortunately I’m really bad at computer games, and haven’t managed to get past the first level. Yet…..

General Midi – not quite dead yet?

MIDI, Recording, Song Writing 3 Responses »

Feb 012008

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.