Practical MIDI

When I first introduced the idea of using MIDI files to my duo partner, I was met with skepticism and doubt, as well as a degree of disdain. After all, we’d both been professional musicians for more than thirty years by that time. My partner considered using MIDI files as cheating, so to speak. He envisioned us playing along to the MIDI files and getting unbelieving stares from the crowd. He thought surely they’d know something wasn’t right here and that they’d boo us off the stage or at the very least, hold their noses on their way out the door.

Well, quite the opposite happened. The crowd loved our new and expanded song selection and the fuller sound they heard. They’d been used to hearing just two guys singing along with two guitars—period. Come on, there’s only so many ways to play “Catch The Wind” before you fall asleep on stage. When my partner got a positive responsive from the crowds we played for, he quickly changed his tune about using MIDI files in our act.

We have a saying between us while we’re on stage. Well, maybe not so much a saying as an acronym that we use to refer to the general, non-musically inclined public audiences…PFB, which stands for Popcorn For Brains. That is, most people in the audience are there to enjoy the music and to dance along to the beat and to drink themselves silly. They actually couldn’t care less about the details of how the music is created. They have no idea what a Fmaj9 chord is or how it relates to the structure of the song.

We’d come to this conclusion long before we became a MIDI duo. While we were still two pieces of a four-piece band we noticed that no matter how hard we worked on rehearsing an intricate, difficult song that we liked, we got little or no response from the audience. However, if we would play some inane, moronic, simple, repetitious, boring tune that everyone recognized, the crowd would go nuts. Case in point…we spent several hours working out a good, technically correct version of Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4” with me providing the horn section on my keyboard. Our guitarist spent additional hours at home getting Terry Kath’s guitar solo down pat. We sounded almost as good as the record. The crowd’s response? “Yeah, yeah. So what. Play “Wooly Bully.”

If not that goofy Sam The Sham ditty, then they’d yell for “Pretty Woman” or “Louie Louie” or some other song that any simpleton off the street could play after one lesson on the guitar. That’s not why we were here, we thought. We were here to show off our individual and collective talents. We were here to get our money’s worth of all those music lessons we took and all those countless hours of practicing. We were here with the hopes that somewhere in the audience was a big shot talent scout who’d hear our to-the-record version of Uriah Heep’s “Easy Livin’” and whisk us off to rock stardom. We surely wouldn’t get that Capitol Records contract by playing “Hang On Sloopy.”

Well, obviously, the talent scout never showed up and we never gave up our day jobs and the band jobs just kept coming as long as we’d prostitute ourselves and play those senseless, over-exposed three-chord songs. We learned to swallow our pride and just take the money at the end of the night and go home. At one point we even considered changing the name of the band to PFB. But then again, we didn’t want to have to explain to the questioning audience what PFB meant.

But at least now you know. Thanks for listening.

©2006 Bill Bernico for CYBERMIDI.com Downwind Publications