Practical MIDI

Having been in the music business since the Stone Age (or was it the Rolling Stone Age) I’ve seen a lot of technology creep into the music scene. I started as a guitarist in my first band and back then a $175.00 guitar was reason enough to take out a 24-month loan and hope you played enough jobs to make it eventually pay for itself. Such was my case back in the mid-60s.

Our keyboard played used a Farfisa Combo organ, which, as many of you old-timers will remember, was state-of-the-art for its day. Problem was, you could only get organ sounds out of it—period. Needless to say, when we played songs by Chicago, our horn section sounded like an organ section. And if you couldn’t reach the singing parts in the key the song was recorded in, forget transposing. That wouldn’t be invented for another couple of decades. You either played the song half a step down on the black keys or you strained your voice trying to reach the high notes.

I taught myself to play keyboards the old-fashioned way—that is, I sat at the piano bench with guitar in hand and plucked a note and then found the corresponding note on the piano. I’d strum chords and then say aloud the notes on the guitar that made up that chord and then find those notes on the keyboard. Granted, it took a lot longer to get comfortable playing the keys that way, but I learned so much more than some stuffy music teacher could have drilled into my teen-aged head.

Okay, time marched on and I soon found myself in another band—as the drummer (another instrument I taught myself to play.) Another member, who also played keys, also played drums and we often switched off on the two instruments on stage. This was twenty-some years ago and at the time I selected my keyboard based on the fact that on the bottom of the unit was a screw that I could turn either left or right to raise or lower the pitch of the keyboard a half step either way. SOLD. That keyboard was made by Bontempi and looking at some of the old VHS tapes of the band, it seems like a toy, which it was. When I later came across my first Yamaha PSR keyboard I noticed right away that it had buttons on the panel to raise or lower the pitch by half steps—up to a full octave either way. It also featured the sounds of real horns, strings, woodwinds, percussion, organ and other sound effects. I was in heaven and that keyboard served me well in the band for many years. It wasn’t until the band broke up and I found myself in a duo that I discovered MIDI and all the wonderful things it could do to make a duo sound like a five-piece band.

My second Yamaha keyboard was the PSR-630 with a built-in floppy drive. That was futuristic as far as I was concerned. I could load maybe 30-35 MIDI files on each disk and play along with the file. Everything worked great unless we got requests for a song that was on some other floppy disk. Switching disks soon became a pain in the neck so I did some more research and found my third Yamaha keyboard—the PSR-8000 with a built-in hard drive. Now I could store all 300 songs from our song list in a single location, including my favorites from the Cybermidi catalog.

Again, all went well until last Sunday’s job. Mid-way through our night, the hard drive crashed and I had to rely on the backup floppies that I always carried for just such occasions. We limped through the night, albeit at a much slower pace, and when the job ended I vowed to research some more and come up with still another alternative to a crash-prone hard drive. Enter my fourth Yamaha keyboard—the PSR-1500. It had no floppy drive, no hard drive and only a small slit in the front of the unit for a memory card. I didn’t take advantage of the memory slot, but I did notice that on the back of the unit there was a full-size (PC-size) USB slot. I pulled my Lexar jump drive from my pocket (it’s no bigger than my thumb) and slipped it into the USB slot and presto—access to 300+ songs again without a floppy drive or hard drive.

I found that for about $30.00 I could buy a second jump drive and load it up with all my favorite MIDI files and keep it in the keyboard case as a backup. The jump drive can even accept sub-directories, so I can still divide my songs into categories—Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Keyboard-Slow, Keyboard-Fast, Extras, Christmas, Wedding and on and on. This technology was making easier for me right along.

I know this sounds like a commercial for Yamaha keyboards, but believe me, I’ve tried Roland and Korg and a few others but soon realized that I’d neglected to get my rocket science degree and soon abandoned them for the user-friendly Yamaha line. If there’s a way for me to do my job more efficiently as well as easier and faster, I’ll find it. And I think I’ve found it with this combination of equipment.

If any of you out there are considering a MIDI-based duo or solo career, feel free to email me with any questions and I’ll be glad to point you in the right direction. Unless you’d rather leave comments to this column, in which case Flash can post the answers for all to see and possibly benefit from. Glad to help.

©2005 Bill Bernico for CYBERMIDI.com Downwind Publications