Using MIDI to Compose Great Music AND Great Performances, I Mean Great Notes AND Great Music!.

Meanwhile, it turns out that MIDI definitely has the timing, amplitude and timbral control capability to represent really musical performance, which is to say it is far more “musical” than dots on a page. There is no reason at all that you can’t create both stunning arrays of notes and fabulous performances using synthesizers, MIDI and computers. You just have to keep some things about music in mind and you have to be prepared to accept the fundamental difference between working in real time (i.e. live) and off-line.

Composers hear in their mind’s ear the way their imagined notes will sound when played by an imaginary great performer. Their job is to organize the musical events to give the performer as much chance as possible of really reaching the audience. They do this intuitively, by the shape of melodies, dynamics, rhythms and the structure within which notes are hung. MIDI is a great place to test these things, especially knowing that when you’re done composing, a really good performer is going to get hold of it, so you don’t have to worry about the performance values particularly.

Meanwhile, the performer has to go inside the music and wear it. In live performance this becomes a kind of intense personalization that happens as a holistic experience. “Getting it on” is our phrase for describing the process of walking the tightrope in sound and time that is musical performance, getting all the elements of timing, phrasing, pitch, execution and emotion to happen as a seamless whole for the audience. It’s a lot of fun when you get it right!

Here’s where MIDI offers us a huge opportunity - the chance to create great performances off-line, in the privacy of our own studio, by allowing us to shape and edit all the above elements, polishing and refining a performance until it glistens like a Mozart phrase – so perfect you can’t imagine it not being just that way!

To do so requires that after we get the notes right, we must start over again on the MIDI map, working like the musical equivalent of a sculptor who has completed his statue and now has to polish and refine it to a high gloss – an out-of-time equivalent to music performance. And in doing this, we have to keep both the lyrical (speech) and physical (movement) elements of our music clearly in mind, shaping both so that the one speaks to our listeners’ hearts and the other to their bodies.

What You Can Do And What You Must Do.

This is a lot of work, and in many respects just playing live is both a lot easier and a lot more fun, if you have the performance technique. I don’t, so I’ve got to do it this way. I suspect that a lot of you are in similar boats. But just because you don’t have the physical chops doesn’t mean you can’t do it. You got to learn to think like a performer, do all those physical performance things off-line. It’s a head trip and a half.

The first thing is that you’ve got to do the work. Don’t expect the MIDI software to do it for you. “Humanizing” and “randomizing” features are attempts to “loosen” a performance, make it sound less like dots on a page. But they’ve got no more soul than the quantized performance did. You are gong to have to inject the soul, a note at a time.

Yup. That’s right. You are going to have to edit every note! For time, loudness, duration, maybe pitch. And that’s not all. When you get done, you are going to have to go back and do it all again, probably several times, until the performance really grabs your test audiences.

In a larger sense, you are going to shape the music at both micro and macro levels. No two notes are ever played exactly the same, no phrase is ever repeated exactly. Music grows, transforms, moves, wriggles, evolves and changes. The surprises in the way the music changes through the course of a piece are an essential element of performance art. So, at the note level, you are going to need to shape the process of how one note connects to the next. At the next higher level, you are going to have to shape how phrases work, how they speak, interconnect, and make a larger musical sense. At the highest level, you are going to have to shape the sections of the piece into a meaningful, exciting and moving experience. Shape your performance, shape your music. Add laughter. Add love. A dash of pain. Some sadness and some joy.

I pass these observations on to you from one of the great performers of the 20th Century, Emil Hauser, founder of the Budapest String Quartet. I had the good fortune to study performance with him for a few years at the end of his career, and these are the things he taught me. Nothing to do with technology or audio. This is the heart of music. Period.

Finally, you’ve got to be obsessive about this, particularly in the studio. I once recorded a guitarist who did maybe 150 passes at a dopey little 8-bar lead in the middle of a song. I was satisfied after about the fifth try, but he kept plugging and plugging away. He got the first four bars really beautiful by about the hundredth pass, and then got the remainder a little quicker. It was exhausting, but he was right and I was too easily satisfied. Those eight bars are really strong, so that when I hear them now they are simply and utterly right, just like Mozart. They speak, they illuminate the rest of the song. And, interestingly, they don’t sound labored at all, but free and natural. That’s what you’re going to have to do, hunched over your miserable software, keyboard and editing screen. In the words of producer John Boylan: Go for spontaneity, no matter how long it takes!

One of the big payoffs you’ll get by trying to think and work this way is that you’ll begin to really get inside the nature of performance. Experiment with time, phrasing, articulation, intonation. As you get more experienced, you’ll get a little faster, and your own “performance” style will begin to emerge.

So don’t use MIDI just to capture performances. Use it to generate them!

Happy solos ‘n soul!