Practical MIDI

April 23, 1995 was the day that I can truly say was the turning point for me in music. To explain fully, I have to go back five years to 1990. That’s when I first ditched the four-piece band in favor of a duo. By 1990 I’d had twenty-four years of playing with bands and frankly the stress was just not worth the effort. There were always four or five or six different personalities pulling the band in as many directions musically and career-wise. While I personally wanted to record some 45s and albums, others in the band didn’t want the responsibility of touring that accompanied the records.

While some of us wanted to specialize in Beatle tunes, others wanted to incorporate polkas and waltzes so we could play the wedding circuit where the money was bigger. As Seinfeld might say, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” I’m sure there were a lot of fat Dutchmen out there making a decent living playing that tune (I say “tune” because if you’ve heard one polka, you’ve heard them all). But personally, I’d have rather gone through root canal surgery with no anesthetic than to play polkas. But then that’s just me.

Anyway, getting back to the duo, we played for those first five years very simply. That is, we had a small P.A. and two acoustic guitars…period. Our repertoire consisted of simple songs from Donovan, Gordon Lightfoot, John Denver, Dan Fogelburg and even Dionne Warwick. Before you yawn and move on to another section of Cybermidi let me get to the good stuff.

The aforementioned artists are professionals in their own right but they didn’t produce a lot of so-called “dance music.” We could go on playing coffee houses and hotels with that song list, but we needed and wanted to play rock and roll, if for no other reason than to keep ourselves from falling asleep on the job.

Enter the Yamaha drum machine. It was a simple machine with a dozen preset beats and a variable tempo slider. Hit the button and play along with the beat. It was an improvement, but still the music sounded empty. Drums and two acoustic guitars just don’t fill the song like it should so I added a bass guitar. Now we had bass, drums and a rhythm guitar. It was okay for simple rock but still it didn’t sound like we wanted it to so I added an electric guitar to the mix. Obviously unless I had two more arms transplanted onto my body I couldn’t play both the guitar and the bass at the same time so I had to switch off between the two.

We were originally doing Elton John’s “Daniel” with just a guitar and bass. That’s when I got the bright idea to add a piano to the ensemble. I could play keys, press the start button on the drum machine and provide some sort of bass sound from the low end of the keyboard. At one point we were playing “Brown-Eyed Girl” with my partner on guitar and me playing bass and keys at the same time. I’d just turn the bass volume up and finger the notes with my left hand while playing organ with my right hand, all the while working the drums machine, with it’s own volume pedal as well as the expression pedal for the keyboard. To say the least I had my hands (and feet) full.

By 1994 we’d added a Digitech Vocalizer that would duplicate our voices realistically, based on the chord I was playing on the keys at the time. Okay, so now I’m working the keys, vocalizer, bass, volume pedal, switching off on guitars and singing. What’s my partner doing all this while? Still just strumming his acoustic and singing.
This is where we started this story. April 23, 1995 we were playing a party near here when a guy from the audience approached me during a break. He said he was impressed how I could do all that I was doing at the same time, but wondered why I was knocking myself out when there was MIDI out there. “MIDI?” I said. “What’s that?”

The guy spent the next twenty minutes explaining to me that most of what I was doing could be handled by a MIDI file that would send those sounds through my keyboard, freeing me up to play the guitar, or the bass or just the keyboard. And we’d be able to get rid of the drum machine in the process. I thought about it for the next few weeks and then invited the guy to my house to delve into MIDI further. I learned enough to know what he was talking about and then went surfing on the web, where I came across many, many sites with MIDI files. I quickly learned that there are sequencers out there who probably think polkas are cultural pieces of music. These are the same guys who sequenced some of the worst MIDI files I’d ever heard.

Then one day I stumbled upon a site called “The MIDI Station” run by some guy named Vince. The first thing I noticed was that the files on his site stood head and shoulders above the rest. I emailed him to compliment him on his sequencing talent and we started a correspondence that has lasted to this day. You probably already know Vince by his other name—Flash. That’s right. The MIDI Station closed and CyberMIDI opened in its place with Flash, er, Vince at the helm. I was able to get my hands on several of Flash’s MIDIs and use them in the duo, where my skeptical partner thought absolute “live” music was the only way to go. We are able to cover rock venues, weddings, clubs, hotels, bars and anything else that may come along. We even do a couple of MIDI versions of (forgive me) polkas.

These days, we do nothing BUT sequenced files in our act, mostly from CyberMIDI, and we’ve never looked back. Thanks Vin.

©2004 Bill Bernico for CYBERMIDI.com Downwind Publications