USB MIDI Controller

USB or Universal Serial Bus is a device that was designed to replace most outdated serial and parallel ports on personal computers, it's a quick and easy way to connect a device directly to a computer and with most operating systems offering plug and play features it can replace the need to install drivers and other time consuming program installation. This technological advancement has benefited home and office computing for years now but it has also made its way into the musical realm also.

A USB midi controllerUSB midi controller serves the same purpose as a standard Midi controller that would require specific midi leads to connect to a computer or device, sometimes even two leads would be required for it to operate properly. The invention of the USB midi controller means that a single device can be connected in a simple and straightforward manner. Previously standard midi would sometimes have to be manually calibrated to play in perfect synchronisation with their host, whereas a USB midi controller takes advantage of its host's intelligent usage of USB by automatically calibrating all its internal settings and time codes to suit its purpose. This is an extremely helpful way to deal with midi connections as it takes away the sometimes stressful nature of combining creativity and technology.MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Made in 1982, it's basically a language used between music and recording equipment. Much like how IT programmers use languages such as C+, Java, PHP etc., music programmers use the language of MIDI to speak to instruments. The most important thing to understand about MIDI is a fact that might save you a lot of frustration down the line:

MIDI is NOT audio

This is a simple but common mistake many beginners make. Although MIDI does make a sound during playback, the MIDI data itself doesn't contain any audio. What it does is it uses meta data - such as what note to play and how long to play it - to trigger sounds. But the sounds themselves come from a different source (by default this is the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth on a PC). Using this fact, you can assign MIDI to trigger sounds from a synthesizer or a hardware sound module. Without a sound source the MIDI data won't make any sound.

Besides note pitch and note velocity (what note to play and how loud to play it), MIDI data also contains note length (how long the note is played), pitch bend (raise or lower the pitch of a note like bending on a guitar), modulation (change the timbre of the sound), and others. MIDI data can control up to 127 parameters, but most MIDI instruments only use a portion of that amount. This means that the creative musician can use the empty available slots to control certain parameters that aren't assigned by default.

By using MIDI, we can compose a song and save the performance as MIDI data (equivalent to writing sheet music for other musicians to play it). Then we can use the MIDI data we saved in a variety of situations, such as using it to trigger sounds from a sound module when performing live (many electronic musicians use this technique). We can also email the data to another composer or musician or bandmate (MIDI files have small sizes because they contain no audio - usually only tens of kilobytes) so that they can build upon the song or use it as a guide for practice.

There are still some concepts about MIDI I haven't explained here. I will explain them in another article. For now I hope this can be useful to help your musical vision.

This simplicity means that a USB controller USB controller can be taken from one environment to another and used in many different ways without the need for constant installation procedures and time consuming calibration and adjustment of internal settings. USB controllers are ideal for people creating any genre of music from the sequenced beats and keyboard lines of Dance music through to the Pop and Rock genres. A USB midi controller is something that will soon replace all types of outdated musical technology and provide its users with unlimited capabilities.Simply put, it's a piano-style keyboard device that is used for sending (MIDI) signals over a USB or MIDI cable to other devices operating on the same MIDI protocol interface. Many alternative designs have pads or buttons that sense the velocity of your fingers to lower or increase play volume such as the Continuum Fingerboard, a fretless design.