Piano Clues

You can expect to find these connectors on your digital piano or electronic keyboard:

• MIDI OUT. You will at least have a MIDI OUT port, for sending MIDI data to other devices.
• MIDI IN. Usually you will also find a MIDI IN port, for receiving MIDI data from other devices.
• MIDI THRU. Some instruments also have a MIDI THRU port, for passing MIDI data from one device to another. This port mainly exists to reduce the cable spaghetti that results from tying many different devices together.

To connect your instrument to your computer you either need:

• A direct cable connection
• A MIDI-to-USB interface
• A MIDI input on your soundcard (game port connector)

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This is the first article in a series on recording MIDI from a digital piano or electronic keyboard.

MIDI stands for “Musical Instrument Digital Interface”. It is a standard communications protocol for electronic instruments.

The main difference between audio recording and MIDI recording is that MIDI does not store the sounds you make, only the names of the keys that you pressed. It is like sheet music or the old piano rolls — but in electronic form.

Most digital pianos and keyboards have MIDI capability: at the very least they can send MIDI messages to other equipment (”MIDI OUT”), but usually they also have the ability to receive MIDI messages (”MIDI IN”).

NOTE: You can also install MIDI into an acoustic piano, but we won’t consider that in this article. Google for “MIDI piano strip” if you are interested in this.

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There are many different ways in which you can make your recordings available for others to hear, but I will simply mention my favorite website:

Go to www.box.net and click Signup to create your account. The free (”Lite”) account will do fine: you get 1 gigabyte of storage space (which is plenty) and files are limited to 10 megabyte each (which is about 10 minutes of stereo music).

The advantage of box.net is that people don’t have to download your music first: they can simply listen online.

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When you’re happy with your recording and post-processing, you can save it to disk with Audacity’s Export As function.

There are several options, but I’ll highlight two:

Export as WAV file. This is the best way to save your recording if you want to edit it later. WAV files are uncompressed audio and contain exactly what you recorded. They are also very big, about 10 megabytes for 1 minute of stereo sound. If you want to burn your recordings to a CD-R, WAV files are the way to go.

Export as MP3 file. This is the best way for saving recordings that are you want to share on the internet. MP3 files are compressed audio, which means they are a lot smaller than WAV files, but their quality is also slightly worse.

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If you are happy with your recording, you can use Audacity to tweak it. It’s always a good idea to cut away unused silence (or wrong tones) at the beginning and end.

Two common post-processing steps are normalizing and noise reduction.

Normalizing

This is a trick that will make the sound of your recording as loud as possible, without distorting it.

If you record multiple pieces to put them on a CD, for example, then it’s important that each track is not significantly louder or softer than the others, otherwise the person listening will have to dial the volume knob up and down with every new track.

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Now that your digital piano or electronic keyboard is connected to the computer, we can record something.

Setting up the volumes

Go into the Volume Control Panel and enable recording for your chosen input (either Line In or Mic In).

If you are connecting Line Out to Line In, move the volume slider all the way up. Set the volume knob on your instrument about halfway.

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This is the first article in a series on recording the sounds from your digital piano or electronic keyboard on the computer, and how to make MP3 files of your performances for sharing with friends or on the web.

Even though these articles mainly talk about recording on your computer, the same principles apply to other digital recording devices. So if you have an MP3 player with recording capability, or a MiniDisc, or any other device with an audio input, you can use that instead and then transfer the files to your computer.

NOTE: These articles are written with Windows in mind. If you use another operating system such as Mac OS X, the hardware directions are similar, but the software will be different.

These are general instructions that should work with any instrument. Because details tend to differ between brands and models, I’ll often tell you to refer to your instrument’s manual.

Always check with your manual first which options apply to your instrument. You can often download the latest version of these manuals in PDF format for free from the manufacturer’s website. The same goes for any additional software you may need, such as device drivers.

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There are a number of online sheet music stores, like Music Notes.com and Sheet Music Direct, that have a huge collection of sheet music for anything from classical to the latest hits.

These sites do not sell hardcopies, but sheet music in digital form. When you buy a digital copy, you pay for the right to print the sheet music (once). You will need to install a special plug-in for your browser to make this work.

The advantage of using these sites is that it’s relatively cheap to get a piece of music, and you can transpose it to another key before you print. So if the music is in the key of Ab, but you’d rather play it in C, you can transpose it up by 4 half-steps and then print it. Try doing that with a hardcopy!

If you’re a real cheapskate, then here’s a trick: You can usually view the first page of the piece for free in your web browser.

You can transpose this page to a more convenient key if necessary, print it out, and even listen to it online.

Often, the first page already contains the entire A-section (or the verse) of the song. This is a great way to get started on figuring out a piece, for free!

The “power chord” is a simplified chord, used mostly by rock guitarists but it also has a place on the piano.

Remember that a major chord consists of the first, third and fifth degrees of the major scale. A minor chord is like a major chord but with the 3rd lowered a half-step.

A power chord, however, just has the 1 and 5 and omits the 3rd. Because we leave out the 3rd in a power chord, it is neither major nor minor.

You can play a power chord whenever a major or minor chord is required. In fact, because the 1 and 5 are present in every chord except for diminished and augmented chords, you can substitute power chords almost everywhere.

The reason rock guitar players love power chords is that you only have to learn a single handshape in order to play all possible power chords. Also, when you apply a lot of distortion to the sound, power chords sound better than full chords.

Power chords are not very common in piano music. But they are useful if you want to play chords way down low on the keyboard.

With those low tones, adding the 3rd makes the sound too muddy, so playing just 1-5 will sound better than 1-3-5.

The notation for a power chord, for example the C power chord, is C5. Less common is something like C(omit3).

Chords are made by playing three or more tones at once. Often we will play chords in root position, which means that the lowest tone is the root tone of the chord.

For example, C major in root position is played as: C - E - G (from low to high)

Often it is useful to put the chord tones in a different order. We’ll go into the reasons why later, but for now I’ll show you how to play such inversions.

If there are three tones in the chord, as in the C major chord above, we can play it in three different positions:

1. Root position (or fundamental position)
2. First inversion
3. Second inversion

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