Tom Smith

Pretty much that. MIDI is a set of instructions -- not merely note and note duration, but velocity, instrument changes (e.g., suddenly going from piano to harpsichord and back again), and many, many other commands to your MIDI instrument or module. What you describe is not something to be "fixed" as such; if you want better sounding instruments, send the MIDI signal to better sounding instruments. The internal default MS Wavetable instrument is roughly the equivalent of the 8-bit Casio keyboards of the 1980s -- it's designed to do the job and not much else.

If you want to hear some kickass MIDI on your computer without getting into a DAW, there are a gazillion ways to do it, and they all involve a player program that has better General MIDI sounds. The easiest and cheapest way I can think of is to get the one-two freebie combo of:

• Cakewalk's SFZ+ Professional (which you can download for free), and
• a free GM soundfont, such as:
  • NTONYX
  • Fluid
  • Musical Box (this one takes a little work to download and set up)

Apart from that, yeah, if you want a MIDI file to sound exactly the same to everyone, then converting it to an MP3 or .WAV is really the only way to go... but then it's not a MIDI file any longer, it's an audio file, and everything about playback and editing is different.

Here, here's my favorite MIDI file: a version of ABC's "The Look Of Love". Even on the basic internal sound, it's awesome. It really shows what can be done with MIDI.

Edited at 2013-02-08 05:14 pm (UTC)

Yes, and no.

There is a collection of the most common instruments called General Midi (or GM). If your midi file follows the GM conventions, then any channel can be any instrument still. However, a program change to 4 always gives you an electric piano and PC 32 is always an electric bass. There are small differences between GM players and how the instruments sound, but in general a GM midi will sound correct as long as the player uses GM music players.

The problem you point out was that in the early days, I could have one music player were Program 1 was a screaming lead synth, and your music player had program 1 play a Glockenspiel. And as much fun as hearing someone try to rock the house with a pitchbending glockenspiel may be, that's not how I created the music. So the General Midi assignment was created to give everyone the same program assignments across the land and make a GM on one machine play the same instruments (with varying qualities) no matter what GM player they used. (Roland Virtual Sound Canvas is a good one - http://www.pgmusic.com/rolandvsc.htm)

Okay, first thing: A new song in BIAB defaults to the key of C Major. It's that little dropdown to the left of the tempo, just below the song name. For the sake of ease and convenience, it's a good idea to put the song in the key you want before you start entering chords. Transposing through that dropdown changes all the chords in the song to what they would be in whatever key you change it to -- e.g., if you start to enter chords in the key of G, and suddenly realize you still have the song in the key of C, changing the song to G will change any G chords in the song to D.

If you want to transpose without changing those chords:

• click and drag over the cells/bars until you've selected the whole song
• press Ctrl+c to copy all those chords
• go to the dropdown and transpose the song, leaving the cells still selected
• press Ctrl+v to paste the original chords over the transposed chords

Once you've done that, you can start inputting chords at any time. And don't be afraid to start out in a key you're more familiar with and then transpose it to the one you want to actually perform in -- I often set up bass runs in C because I know that key better, and then transpose it to E or somethin'.

The C/Dm chord you refer to would be interpreted by BIAB as a C with a D minor bass -- is that what you have in mind? It may help, until you get used to things, to use the Chord Builder (right-click on a bar, or Ctrl-Shift-B) to get the exact chords you want. You can also use the bar's Chord Settings (alt F5) to edit each beat's chord and rest/stop/hold.

Now, when you say you want to Create a style, do you mean you want to:

• load a style from the ones that come with BIAB?
• cobble together a hybrid style from the ones that come with BIAB?
• create your own original style?

For the sake of this, I'm going to assume the first. To the left of the song title is the Style button. Click on that. (If it says it needs to rebuild, do so.) This will bring up the Style Picker, and all you need to do is click on a category of styles you like, click on a style name, and then click OK at the bottom (or double-click the style, and the window will close automatically).

Now click on GenPlay in the main window to generate and play the song. (If you're not running BIAB 2013, click the Play transport icon. In 2013, Play is now used to simply Play an already-generated song without changing anything.) If you like it, you can Freeze it, either the whole song or by-track.

Does this help?

Edited at 2013-02-08 07:14 pm (UTC)

Hm. Haven't tried the nesting thing. I'll look it over and give it a shot. And I know there are a few tutorial videos on YouTube I should peruse....