Practical MIDI

Here’s a neat little story of how MIDI files came in handy for two of my friends on one of their jobs here in Wisconsin. It was several years ago at a Holiday Inn near Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Terry and Rich, two guys who used to play in my band broke away and formed a duo.

Their act consisted of sequenced parts that they played along to so they could round out their sound. They both played guitar so they needed the bass, drums and keyboard sounds sequenced to make them sound like a full band without the overhead.

Anyway, they’re playing their little hearts out one night when Terry looks out into the audience and recognizes someone. He elbows Rich and gestures toward the man. Rich didn’t get it. Within a few minutes Terry and Rich took a break and hurried over to talk to the man who had been watching their act. He’d seemed especially interested in several songs that these two local musicians were playing. Namely, “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising” and “Green River.”

Terry confidently walked up to the man, who had seated himself at the bar, and introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Terry and this is Rich,” Terry said to the man.

The man shook Terry’s hand and replied, “Hi. I’m…”
“I know. You’re John Fogerty,” Terry said, finishing John’s sentence for him.
Now Rich saw in the man’s face the features he’d seen so many times on album covers over the past thirty years. “This is a real honor,” Rich said.
Turns out that John Fogerty is a pilot of sorts and had flown in to the Fond du Lac airport and was in the area for E.A.A., the Oshkosh air show held every summer near here. John complimented the two on their renditions of his tunes. Terry seized the opportunity to grasp the chance of a lifetime by inviting John to come up on stage and play a few Creedence Clearwater numbers with them. Amazingly Fogerty accepted, having seen what MIDI files could do for the accuracy of such tunes. After all, he probably wouldn’t have agreed to play with just anyone if he wasn’t sure he’d sound good doing it.

When their break ended, Terry and Rich took the stage again and launched right into “Proud Mary” again and abruptly stopped after fifteen or twenty seconds. They wanted to get the audience’s undivided attention and they had it now. Terry stepped up to the microphone and announced, “Yeah, I know we did this one already but I thought you’d like to hear how it’s supposed to sound. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you, the composer and artist of this tune, Mr. John Fogerty.”

When Fogerty took the stage, the patrons thought it was some sort of joke until they too saw the familiar face. As soon as Fogerty opened his mouth to sing, they knew this was the genuine article. The place exploded in applause. John stayed on stage to play four Creedence Clearwater songs before returning to the bar.

During the next break Terry sat with John Fogerty and said that he and Rich were playing this same lounge again tomorrow night and would he like to play with them again? Fogerty accepted (he was in town for the whole weekend, so why not?) He asked Terry if they knew any other Creedence Clearwater songs and Terry immediately remembered that he had an entire collection of CCR MIDI files on his computer at home. He asked Fogerty which songs he’d like to play and the next afternoon, before their second night at the Holiday Inn, Terry worked up half a dozen famous Creedence songs and brought them back to the stage on a floppy disk.

Needless to say, the second night of playing with John Fogerty went better than the first. Now Rich and Terry have a fabulous story they can tell their friends and family about for years.

I never tire of hearing that one myself. My MIDI collection contains three hundred files by a lot of famous artists. And I’m still hoping that one night on my job, that I’ll look out into the audience and be able to confidently invite them to play with me on stage for my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If they ever hear my Cybermidi renditions, they won’t hesitate for a second.

©2002 Bill Bernico for CYBERMIDI.com Downwind Publications