11 | P a g e
USEFUL MIDI BACKGROUND
MIDI was mostly invented by a guy named Dave
Smith who is famous for making the Prophet line of
synthesizers, the first with digital controls that were
polyphonic and had presets.
One of the original goals of MIDI was to have a
keyboard on one synthesizer play the sound engine of a second synthesizer. Of course, once this was
done the flood gates were opened for new ideas and innovative use cases. The inception of MIDI
controllers with keyboard, button, knobs and sliders and MIDI sound modules exploded. A bit later,
software applications for patch librarians, sequencing and controlling slowly emerged as connectivity to
computers happened.
It was around 1983, when you listened to music on vinyl and cassette tapes in your car. VCRs were not
too common yet, and half the people were still watching TV with antennas. A personal computer cost
two to three times the price of a beater car and so did synthesizers!
Processing power of your smart-watch is about a zillion times more powerful than the processors used
in synthesizers back then. So the goal was to make the MIDI communication protocol as lightweight as
possible. Which means it’s pretty dumb.
Things you should know about MIDI…
MIDI 1.0 is a one-way communication standard, aka half-duplex. Which means each cable only carries
messages from one machine to the other, and not back the other way. What this means is, if you send a
MIDI message to your synth, you have no idea if it got there or if the message action was carried out.
Things changed a little bit when computers got cheaper and USB was invented. The companies that
were making software for MIDI started to send MIDI messages over USB cables.
USB cables are a lot different than 5-Pin MIDI cables. For one, USB cables carry all kinds of simultaneous
messages, from devices such as mice, keyboards, printers, scanners, external hard drives, memory
sticks, cell phones, 3D printers and on and on and on. Messages can be sent in both directions too.
MIDI over USB cables
Even though USB (and other cables/protocols) were now being used to send MIDI messages, the MIDI
specification wasn’t changed. So when you send a MIDI message the device is not required to send a
response even though the USB cable can do this. Of course, there are some exceptions where some
DAWs and quasi proprietary controllers do bi-directional (aka full-duplex) communication.
Also, USB has an egalitarian nature. This means that there is always a HOST and a DEVICE. Recall USB
was invented for personal computers. So the HOST would be the PC and the DEVICE would typically be
the mouse, keyboard or printer. So just like you can’t plug a QWERTY keyboard into a printer, you can’t
just plug a MIDI controller into a synthesizer. One of them must be the HOST and one of them has to be
the DEVICE.
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