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MIDI terms and concepts

MIDI Channel 

MIDI has 16 channels per port. Each channel carries separate musical data (notes, controls).
This enables one MIDI cable to control multiple instruments at once — e.g.:

  • Channel 1: piano

  • Channel 10: drums

  • Channel 5: bass

A device (hardware or software) can listen only to the channel it’s assigned to or, when enabled to omni, receive midi data from all channels. When communicating between different devices who accept MIDI data, make sure they are set to the same channel.

See the example page for different configuration cases

Voices

When sending note data to a soundmodule, sampler or synthesizer it can play a single voice(monophonic), two voices (duophonic) or multiple voices (polyphonic). Paraphonic is a function where an instrument plays multiple voices, but shares one and the same volume envelope.   

Multitimbral and layering  

 

Multitimbral

Layering

keyboard split

velocity split

Note on/off

Velocity

CC

Aftertouch

polyphonic presure

Program change

Pitch bend / Modulation = cc (klavier)

Clock / Tempo

General MIdi

Toonladders in Midi

Program change events

Controller events

System Exclusive messages (SysEx)

Keyboard Synthesizer

Standalone Sound Generators

Standalone Controllers

Drum Machine

Computers

sequencer

Other Applications