Happy 30th Birthday MIDI - How MIDI Changed The World Of Music

M.I.D.I. should be spelt..E.P.I.C.!

Atari STe 1040, KCS Omega, monthly copies of ST Format/Review, multiple sound modules.

God bless the 5-pin DIN. :-)

Yes, I remember purchasing Memorymoog in 1980, and a few months later, memorymoog with midi input-output came out.
Was shocked by a sudden change.

I used cubase 2.0 on atari 520 and 1040 with diferent synths, drum machines and samplers during 3/4 years.
You know how many bugs i had with? Zero! Impossible with actual pc's.

NOTATOR LE, on ATARI 1040 STe! 1985!! Still rockin' this setup, the most solid MIDI timing, hands down, ever.. it will always be the center of my midi production!

MIDI is simply great. And it is still evolving with keeping compatibility. Just look here to see what they do now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTP_MIDI

I just can't wait for the next step, called internally HD. I have seen their presentation in NAMM this year : very promising.

I started making music in 1980 and when midi came along it was like something awesome! It also had a randomness of sorts to it because sometimes all kinds of machines would be triggered or wouldn;t quite work the way one intended them to and happy accidents of sound happened all the time. So amazing

And RogueAI is of course correct about CVGate.

But the arrival of MIDI was like a sea change. All of us who were there remember it the way Boomers remember the beginning of color television. You know where you were and what you were wearing the first session you saw it in action.

And your life was changed FOREVER.

Happy Birthday, MIDI. Thank you. And as a musician: thank God for you. You really did set some of us free to simply create. No more bowing and curtsying, no more buttkissing, no more Beta Wolf posturing, no more sucking it up --

MUSIC.
PERIOD.
THE END.

Happy Birthday MIDI!

P.S.: Somebody please hurry up and invent MIDI for the motion picture industry. With sequenced actors and crew you can pick out of folders out of a box of software. NOW please.

Love,
Hollywood

30 years? Jesus... suddenly, I'm old.

I remember CLEARLY when fellow musicians in Atlanta were just beginning to talk about this mystical, magical electronic Jedi trick that could do everything, anything. As a keyboardist I fell right in step and have never looked back. MIDI liberated us musicians and programmers from the office politics, drama and stupidity of directly associating with actual, human musicians in order to create stuff. That freedom has come with its drawbacks of course... but I love my machines :)

Switch em on, program em, tell em what to do, they comply until stopped or shut off, and

No more jealous drummer girlfriends
No more evil drummers' wives
No more late bass players
No more egotistical lead guitarists
No drummer drought ever, ever again

JUST MUSIC.
YOURS.
EXACTLY THE WAY YOU HEARD IT.
NO DRAMA. NO BACKTALK.
INSTANTLY.

I feel everybody who might think the above is a bad thing, but as an attractive (or so they say) female musician, I've had more than my fill of jealous musician gfs and wives, and MIDI was the beginning of The Official End of That Bulls--t, Forever.

The main drummer I'm the angriest at about that -- almost 20 years later, that's how bad it was -- PS, he and evil fat jealous harpy wife divorced. He's single now and I would never.

And I have my sequencers :)

Great tribute to the Electronic Emancipation Proclamation of Music, by the way. Thanks. Perfect photo to sum MIDI up. Nice - says it all :)

como baixar?

WOW IM SO OLD , I STARTED WITH A HEWETT PACKARD CPU 4MB RAM, SP1200 AKAI S 900 AN A ROLAND X P50 AN ALESIS HR 16 DRUM MASCHINE ALL MIDI TO CAKEWALK. NOW I USE REASON AN PANORAMAP4 AND MASCHINE. AN IM STILL BROKE LMAO BUT IM HAPPY. HAPPY B DAY TO MIDI

http://www.davesmithinstruments.com/news/

The inventors of MIDI to receive a technical Grammy.

wow
happy birthday

I remember upgrading from an AWE 32 to XG SW60 Midi card. It was incredible. XG midi was where it was at. Probably still is in some circles.

LOL @ free Radical! I remember the days using Octamed...it felt like Witchcraft at the time!

happy birthday midi !!!, i started with midi drum mashines in the 80s, mostly all the tr series 626, 727,ect. used some atari ste, stf, with a midi/sampler type interface called replay 16, i miss my old simple beats of the 80s.
ps.. alot of top chart eletro/trance producers still use atari ste/stf, they say they like the timing of the seq.

Ah i remember my first introduction to midi. It was cubase on the Atari ST accompanied by various modules each the size of a VHS video recorder (one of the old ones)
The old five pin din plugs. They seemed so advanced at the time. Not like this usb plug in and play malarkey. We actually used to have to set things up with wires and plugs you know?
A friend of mine was actually electrocuted because he hadn't earthed his guitar before plugging it into the top of the range akai sampler which held a massive 2kb of storage.
Kids these days don't know how easy they've got it......."Dad, i'm bored with x-box kinnect"
"Shut your pie hole son, we only had sega mega drive and squidgy black to smoke. None of this stupidly named high grade skunk nonsense."

Good call - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CV/Gate

"No longer did everything have to played live but could instead be sequenced and played back."

This was possible before midi. It was called CV/gate. MIDI just expanded on it (digitally) and made polyphonic sequencing easier.