Practical MIDI

Back in 1969 Denny Zager set half an hour aside from his busy day and penned the song, “In The Year 2525” and had a million-selling hit on his hands. These days this one-hit-wonder is running an internet site where he sells custom-adjusted guitars. I only know this because I bought one of his guitars and it was fantastic, as claimed. Naturally I couldn’t think of the guitar without thinking of the Zager and Evans tune and it got me to thinking about the future.

When I was sixteen and playing in my first band I used to think that I couldn’t imagine still playing for an audience when I was fifty. I stopped thinking that five years ago. But realistically, I know I won’t still be playing when I’m a hundred years old, which would be in the year 2050. But it just stands to reason that many others will be doing what I used to enjoy doing—making music for the masses.

Let’s take a sneak peek into the year 2050 to see what role MIDI will be playing, shall we? Flash will still have the Cybermidi site going strong because, hell, he’ll only be a youngster of ninety-four when he sequences MIDI tune number 48,235. However, MIDI will have evolved by leaps and bounds by that time. It will have the ability to incorporate more than WAV files. It will be able to embed real human voices to sing background for you. They can be right on the mark, or flat like some real singers. MIDI voice choices will expand from 128 to 9,600 and will have a section of more than a hundred voices for guitar alone. There’ll be voices for an SG with fuzz, without fuzz, Telecaster with Wah-Wah, Les Paul with flanger, Stratocaster on fire (for those realistic Hendrix tunes) and maybe even a voice to replicate the sound of Pete Townsend smashing his guitar to smithereens.

The keyboard section will incorporate more than just the dozen or so voices it now offers. There’ll be a voice for Hammond with Leslie, Farfisa through a Fender Twin Reverb, Vox keyboard played with your elbow (John Lennon at Shea Stadium) and perhaps the realistic sound of a Honky Tonk piano being played by a one-handed monk from Iowa. Who knows?

Also embedded into each MIDI file will be holographic images which, when played through the futuristic player will project the image of four other musician on stage with you so you won’t feel like a solo act at all. Programmed into each file will be commands that will tell the drummer when to sneeze, if you want to get that realistic. It could program the guitar player to break a string, stop the song, change the string and continue with the rest of the song. We’re talking life-like here folks. At the end of the night when those holographic images stand there with their hands out looking for their cut of that night’s pay, all you have to do is shut off the projector and pocket the proceeds yourself.

The horn parts (with their holographic counterparts) could be programmed to have each horn player step in time with the music. Let’s call that the choreographic feature of MIDI. These cyber players will be so life-like that you may be tempted to fire any one of them. If that’s the case, just edit that player out of the final mix and find another source code patch to create the player who won’t give you any more lip.

On those nights when you have something more important going (I can’t imagine what) and you don’t even feel like being there yourself, just program your image into the file and stay home in your easy chair with the remote. I’m sure the bar owner will just mail you a check.

©2004 Bill Bernico for CYBERMIDI.com Downwind Publications