 In today's video, we'll be taking a look at Studio One MIDI Basics. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. So if you're just getting started with Studio One, learning how to record and edit MIDI is a key skill. And that's what we're going to be looking at in today's video. We're going to be running through what MIDI actually is, how to set up Studio One to record MIDI and how to edit MIDI in different ways. So stick around for all of that. Before we do get started, if you like this kind of content all about home recording, DAWs, gear reviews, plugin reviews, that kind of thing, then please do subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you get notified about my future videos. Now let's get stuck into some MIDI. So I thought we'd start off by talking about what MIDI actually is because I see some people who've been recording for years who still get confused about this so let's dispel that confusion now. I've got a project open here in Studio One and I've enlarged two tracks. The first one in blue there is a MIDI track. That's something I've recorded earlier and you can see the notes there on that MIDI track. The second one is a bass guitar track and that's an audio track. That's the two types of things that you can really record in Studio One, MIDI and audio. Now, if we have a listen, I press play, you can hear that bass guitar. You can see the waveform there and that's because we've recorded that in much the same way as we used to record to tape. We've recorded the actual sound of the instrument. Now with the MIDI track, if I go to the piano and then I click on play, that is the sound of silence and that's because MIDI itself makes no sound. Let me say that again, MIDI makes no sound. Instead, what MIDI does is it records events. In this case, the events of me playing on my external keyboard. It records which note was played. It remembers how long that note was played for, whether I'm using the sustain pedal, whether I'm using modulation, pitch band, all kinds of other controls on my keyboard. But the actual sound is not recorded. Now in the old days, what we used to do was we would connect, say a synthesizer or a drum machine via MIDI cables to the computer and then we could use this as a sequencer. We could control those external instruments using MIDI information like this. But if we actually wanted to get the sound of the actual instrument, we had to still use audio cables coming from that instrument, going into an audio interface and actually record the sound. Now these days we have something called virtual instruments. These are really like synthesizers inside the computer itself because computers are much more powerful now. And of course we don't have to use cables to make the connections. But we do still have to make a connection of a kind and that's a software connection. So what I'm going to do now is connect this MIDI track up to a virtual instrument. I've got one already loaded up, so I'll just go up here to the top and I'll select the output of this MIDI and it's going to go to this piano instrument here. Now if I press play, so that MIDI information is actually playing that piano in real time. Every time I hit play on my DAW Studio One, it's actually going to play any MIDI instruments in real time. That's very, very handy because we can make adjustments to the notes. So we could change some pictures. We could change the duration of notes. We could actually change the instrument itself. We could hook this MIDI up to a different instrument if we decide not to use this piano. And that's all the things I'm going to be covering in the rest of this tutorial. So I hope that's clear to you now what MIDI actually is. No sound, just information about what was played. So in order to record some MIDI, you're going to have to have some kind of input device. Either an external keyboard like a controller keyboard or a synthesizer or electric piano or maybe a drum machine. Now if you don't have any of those things, I'm going to show you a quick workaround so that you can actually use your computer keyboard to play notes. So let's go ahead and do that now. We're at the start screen here in Studio One. Let's quickly set some things up. We'll go down to configure external devices. I'll click on that. Now let's use the case where you don't have an external device first because it's very, very easy to set up your QWERTY keyboard. Just click on add at the bottom here. Go down to the personas folder. Open that up. Go down to where it says QWERTY keyboard. Click on OK. And you've added your computer keyboard as a device that can be used for MIDI input. Now the other way of doing is when you have something like an external keyboard and that's going to slightly vary depending on which one you have. In my case, I have a specific one which is in the list. So I'll click on add. Mine's a Yamaha and I'll go down to the Yamaha folder and I'll click on KX and I'll just make sure that I set up the ports correctly. So this is where your instrument is connected to the computer whether it's by MIDI cables or whether it's by USB. In my case, it's by a USB cable and that's called USB MIDI cable and I'm going to set that for the receive from and the receive to and I'll click on OK for that. Now if you go to add and you look at the list of devices there and yours is not listed, that's OK. Just click on new keyboard at the top there. Give it a name. I'll leave mine as new keyboard and then just select your connection there whether it's as I say MIDI or a USB cable. Select the in and out connections. Click OK. And the main functions of that keyboard are going to work. The keys and probably a few other smaller functions like the sustain pedal modulation pitch, etc. But you won't have complete control over your keyboard, but you can use it as a MIDI input device. So that is how you go ahead and add your instruments and now we're ready to go ahead and actually create our first MIDI track. So I'm going to start off by creating a new song. I'm here at the Studio One Start page and I'm just going to click on create a new song. That brings up this dialog box and I want to create an empty song. So under styles I'll just select the empty song template and I'll call this song MIDI. Creative, huh? Then I'll click on OK and that opens up this empty song here. Now if I just want to go ahead and create a pure MIDI track I could right click on the left over here and select add an instrument track. Now these terms are a little bit interchangeable in Studio One MIDI and instrument here. So to create a MIDI track we create an instrument track. Now this is like the track that we created earlier on, the one that had no sound. If we recorded something in here now with our keyboard things would appear on the screen but there would be no actual sound and that's because it's not connected to any kind of instrument. And if you were connecting to an external instrument such as a synthesizer or a piano or drum machine this is how you would probably create that track. But we're going to be connecting to a virtual instrument one that everybody should have on their system and that's a little bit easier than just adding an instrument track there. So we'll get rid of that one. I'll click on remove track and instead we're going to go over to the right hand side here and in the browse window we're going to select the instruments tab which I already have selected. I'm going to go down to the personas folder and double click on that and then I'm going to double click on presence. That's our presence virtual instrument and then under these presets I'm going to go for piano. I'll double click on piano folder and then I'm going to select the third one down which is acoustic piano full and I'm just going to drag it all the way over to the left hand side and what that does is it sets up our MIDI track but it also sets up the virtual instrument as well and it connects the two together so that we're ready to go. Now if you didn't see that particular instrument there it's probably because you haven't downloaded it yet. In order to do that just quickly go up to studio one at the top there and then go to studio one installation. That opens up this window where you can install extras for studio one and you want to go into the instruments folder and the presence XT core library and I would actually just download all of the instruments in there but if you just want this particular one I think it's in the presence XT core keyboards library. I'm not absolutely certain but I'm pretty sure it is. If I'm wrong let me know down in the comments. I've already got it so I don't need to download it but you should if you want to follow along with this exactly. So we have our instrument ready almost to record but there's a couple of things we're going to have to do. We're going to have to make sure we have an input selected. Now that's the two things that we added earlier. Now I've got my Yamaha keyboard, you may be using the PC keyboard so let's take a look at that first. In order to use the PC keyboard what you're going to have to do is open the mix window and I'll do that by clicking on mix at the bottom right hand corner and this shows the mix console and right over to the left you can see there's an external button there to show external instruments or connections sorry devices and that will open up that and then you can see your QWERTY keyboard there. Double click on that and it will open up this QWERTY keyboard interface which you can see there and now if I play on my computer keyboard nothing happens and that's because we need to be able to arm this so that we can hear sounds. I'll just get rid of that mix window there and I'll go up to the top where I've got created my track and I'm just going to record enable it by hitting the record button. That also switches on this speaker icon here so that we can hear things. If you didn't actually want to record at the moment you could just hit the speaker icon so you can hear what's going on but I'm going to record so I'll click on that. Now if I play on my QWERTY keyboard I can play my piano and I can also play on my Yamaha keyboard here which is this one. Okay if you want to pick a specific device to record from just click on this I icon up here open that go down to in and then you can select a specific input there. At the moment I've got it listening to all inputs it will record from whatever I play. Okay so we're pretty much ready to go ahead and record but we want to be setting up the metronome. So while I'm recording I want to play along with a click or a metronome to stay in time so I need to be setting that up as well as the tempo of the song as well. So right at the bottom to the right of the transport controls we can see this metronome section here and I'm just going to click on that sort of triangular shape icon there and turn it blue and that means we can now hear the metronome. If I press play by pressing space on my keyboard we can hear that the metronome is set up. A couple of things it may not be the correct tempo and also it may not be loud enough so let's deal with the tempo first. To the right again of that metronome section we'll see the tempo section over there. Now I can just click on that number where it says 71 at the moment I can click on that and I can enter a new value. If I put in 100 press enter that sets up the tempo of the song like that or you may want to set it up by feel you can sort of feel that tempo when you're playing and the way you'll do that is to left click with your mouse on the word tempo here just for a few bars and it's going to calculate the actual beats per minute that you need. So I'll do that now takes a little while before it kind of calibrates and it's settled on 70 there and that seems fine so I've done you know a bar and a half of clicks there. Now once you've done that you may want to set up the volume of the metronome. We're going to do that by clicking on the mix button here to open up the mix console and right to the right hand side of that console we can see the master fader. Now right in the middle above the master fader you can see a little icon there and if we hold down on that icon we can adjust the level of the click or the metronome there. So I'll put it up at the top and then I'll press play again to have a listen. Now that still may not be loud enough for you if you want it to cut through while you're recording. So what you can also do, I'll just shut the mix control, what you can also do is go back to the metronome section click on that little spanner icon there and that brings up a few more properties of the metronome there. So I'm just going to push that accent level up quite a lot and that beat level up quite a lot there now. I'll close that have a listen okay that's quite a bit louder especially on the accent there so that will be fine for me. So we're ready to go ahead and record this piano part. So my click and tempo is set up and I have my track armed for recording because I can see that nice red button highlighted there and I'm ready to start recording. Now I'm going to leave it a barrel so before I actually play anything I always like to leave a little bit of a space at the beginning of a song and I'm going to start recording by hitting either on the record button at the bottom here or I'm going to click on my asterisk key on my computer keyboard which is my preferred method and that's going to start the recording. Now wish me luck because I'm not that good a piano player and I'll see you on the other side. Okay so it's not the best performance ever but it is the best that I could do for the moment and sometimes we have to make do with that but it does leave scope for me to edit things and make it a little bit better so let's get into that. Before we do start editing I'm just going to tidy up my interface a little bit. I don't need the presence window anymore so I'll get rid of that and I don't need the browse panel anymore so I'll get rid of that by clicking on the browse button at the bottom right and then I'm not really doing any more recording so I can disarm this track for recording by clicking on the record button up there on the track and then I'm going to start editing so I'll select the clip that I've just created there and I'm going to start editing by hitting the edit button down the bottom or you could click F2 on the keyboard as well to open up the piano roll window which is what we're going to be editing with. Now there's a couple of things that you can do with this window. You can drag the top of it up to make it bigger which should be quite handy in this case or you can actually detach it. Now right in the top right hand corner of this panel there's an arrow diagonal arrow click on that and that detaches this interface. Now I find this really rather handy if I resize it there I find it handy because I use two monitors normally so I can drag this off onto the other monitor double click on its title bar like so and the whole thing takes up the whole screen it gives me a nice space to work with but I'm working in one screen today for this tutorial so I'll just attach it back down there but it's really handy thing to do. I also do that with the mix window as well just so you know now what we have here on the left hand side is a piano keyboard and that shows us which notes are being played here in the main view so you can actually click on that to hear the notes and then we get the main view itself where we can see the notes. Now you'll notice at the top there's a ruler and the numbers on that ruler show you the number of the bar and then the beat within the bar so we've got bar 2 here at the beginning and then beats 2, 3 and 4 there. Now you're going to notice quite a few vertical lines there in between I would sort of refer to those as the grid lines and they become very very important later for quantizing and snapping which we will get to but do be aware that you can change those grid lines up here with the quantize setting so it's set to 1 16th at the moment meaning the whole bar is divided into 16 parts each beat therefore is divided into 4 so I could change that to say 1 8 the whole bar is divided into 8 each beat is divided into 2 ok so I'll change it back to 1 16th there just so that I think that's where we're going to need it so how do we actually go about editing individual notes. Let's say we've got this note here we click on it it will highlight and if we grab the middle of it we can just drag it around so we can drag it up and down to a different pitch or we can drag it from side to side to a different position ok now you'll notice it is snapping there it's snapping to each line on that grid line there and it's also snapping to the point here where it wasn't it didn't start off quite on the grid line it's just a little bit before and it's staying on there now that's really really handy if you just want to change the pitch of a note without changing its timing it'll snap to that little off beat that it's on there ok so that's how you can change the position and the pitch of the note now if you didn't want it to snap at all you would turn that feature off so you can either toggle it by clicking up here on this icon or you can use N on your keyboard to toggle it off and on and then when it's off you can freely drag that to any timing that you wish ok so pretty easy so far I think you'll agree now if you want to change the start time of the or the start point of the note without changing the rest of the duration of the note or where the note ends I should say you can just grab the beginning so hover over the beginning of the note the icon will change and then you can start to drag the beginning of the note around and you'll notice the end stays in position likewise you can go to the end of the note and you can drag the end of the note around as well now let's say you want to change the duration of a number of notes well let's grab a few that have a different duration so I'm dragging left dragging across with my mouse selecting all of those hovered on that one as well so grab that one and then if I drag the end points of the notes you'll notice they all change to make that easier to see I'm just going to turn the snapping off and you'll see that they change relatively so if they started off short they get shorter relatively if they're long they'll still stay as long notes okay now if you want to make them all the same length exactly then just hold control on the keyboard as you drag and then they'll snap to whatever length the first note that the note that you're actually dragging is going to okay and then you'll have uniform lengths on those notes that's quite handy if you want uniform lengths so apart from changing the pitch of the note and the position the beginning and the end of the note we can also do things like change the velocity of a note so that's all in the bottom part here of this interface and it's a little small at the moment so I'll just hover over the top of that and I'll just drag it up okay and now because velocity is selected on the left hand side over here we can see the velocity of the individual notes so we can go ahead and start to drag those lines around and you'll hear that it plays the note every couple of seconds every second or so just so you can hear how loud it's becoming okay now if you sometimes it's a little difficult to choose an individual note especially when they're clustered together like these ones are here so what we would do in that case is select the note up here that we want to change the velocity of say this one here and then when we drag down here it's only going to change that highlighted note not the ones around it so that's really really handy likewise you can make a selection of notes across this way horizontally so maybe I want to select all those notes there and I want to change the velocity of all of those so I'm going to drag one of them up and down and can you see that they're all changing in velocity but relatively okay now if you want them all to snap to the same velocity hold control on the keyboard and there they are they've snapped to the same velocity so that's another way to get some uniformity if that's what you want so that covers the basics of sort of changing the notes which are already there of course you can go ahead and delete notes if you want you could select a note and just hit delete on the keyboard and that note disappears I'll undo that and if you want to create a new note you can just double click somewhere like so and it creates that note now it's going to create it to the length of the note it's going to be dependent upon the quantized settings you've got up there so if you want to create a bunch of longer notes than that then you would change the quantized settings to say something like one quarter so it's just a whole beat for each note and then when I insert it it's going to be created at that length okay so you can just manually create them in that way so that really covers the basics of editing MIDI there's quite a lot more to it there's some really nice sort of actions and things you get in Studio One for MIDI we'll cover that in a later tutorial but that's all we'll need to know for the basic editing for now except for the fact we want to deal with quantizing. So quantizing is a function where we attempt to get the computer to tidy up the timing of our playing automatically for us so rather than individually edit notes as we were a moment ago we can get the computer to select a whole bunch of notes maybe the whole song and apply quantizing and it will try to correct the timing of those notes for us now it's really simple to apply quantizing if we select something like this clip at the top here we just have to hit Q on the keyboard to apply quantizing but what actually happens depends on the settings that you have set up previously so I'll undo that now there's a couple of places where we can create those settings first of all at the top of the screen in Studio One you'll see a section there where it actually says quantize and at the moment it's set to one sixteenth and there's some related settings next to that also just a little further to the left you'll see a Q button there if you click that it opens up a panel which we have some quantized settings there as well now those all relate to quantizing anything in this tracks view up here so like this whole clip we've just selected but we also have similar or the same quantize settings down in the edit view further down so again we have where it says quantize there we can select make some different selections there and then also off to the left there we have a Q button again where we can open similar settings so the settings that you create are applied in the place where you've created those settings that makes much sense so the ones at the top relate to the things in the edit view the ones down the bottom in the edit view relate to things in the edit view and they can be different settings so for example if at the top I'll just set my quantizing to something different I'll select the clip and I'll click Q and you'll see down the bottom all those notes change bang to some weird positions I'll undo that now if I go down to the bottom it's set to one sixteenths I'll select a whole bunch of notes like so hit Q on my keyboard and you'll see something quite different happen there because there's different settings so what those settings are really about is quite simple if you look at the grid lines you remember earlier we talked about these vertical grid lines I have got my bars divided into sixteen at the moment here so what the computer's going to do is look at the beginning of that note and we're focusing on the beginning you can actually quantize ends as well but we'll look at the beginning of that note and it will say hey where's the nearest bar line and obviously we can see it's that one so when I hit Q it's just going to move that to that bar line and that's the sort of basics of how you set up your quantizing so if you're getting unexpected results when you quantize there's probably two reasons for that one is that you haven't set that setting correctly you haven't got your division set up correctly so that's the one thing to look at and the other thing is if you're playing is really awful with the timing really way off then of course the computer's just going to put it in the wrong place because the computer doesn't really understand music in the same way men you do now if you're more musically inclined if you come from a more music theory background you may find a little bit easier to use the quantize settings here by hitting that Q button so I could change it here to you know say like crotchets there and I could move it to that and that set that up there so if I hit the apply button you'll see that it applies quantizing again there you can see the grids changed as well so if I just shuffle that over to there and apply that quantizing you'll see it was a little closer to that line so it's moved it there so that's a really important function in MIDI now you do want to play around with some of these settings a bit because if you over quantize things then that's when we get that really robotic music which doesn't sound very human and a part like this when it's a piano part you'll notice for example there's some chords here look at this chord here it's a good example and you'll see that not only the notes slightly before the bar which can be a good thing sometimes that for to have things just sort of attacking that beat but they're also in slightly staggered sort of timings because as you hit the piano keyboard you don't necessarily hit them exactly all at the same time and that's a good thing for piano sound you'll notice if you do quantize something like this chord here let's have a listen to it before we quantize it okay now I'll quantize it and it's just a little bit too rigid sound if you do that to the whole piece for something like a piano it can sound a little odd so you want to be a little bit careful play around with some of the things like the range setting here that can help you out with that sort of thing like the swing setting I'll let you fiddle around with that the main thing you need to understand about quantizing at the moment though is your basic grid settings so if you remember earlier we talked about the fact that MIDI has no actual sound but instead we're recording just events and that makes it incredibly flexible because as you can see we've been able to move some of those events around we can affect duration we can affect pitch all that good stuff the other thing that we can do is change the actual sound itself and I'm just going to show you quickly with a little experiment how we could do that here so I'm just going to change over to the mix window here by clicking on mix and on the console all the way over to the left you can see this column I've got there and it's instruments and that shows my presence instrument that I've got there at the moment if you can't see that you'll just need to click on that instrument toggle there right on the left now just for now I'm just going to go in click that little triangle and rename that if you remember that is a piano so let's name it piano just so we can be sure then I'm going to go over to my browse panel I'm going to go into my on the instruments tab I'm going to go to personas go to presence again this time I'm going to select a guitar and then let's go for nylon guitar and we'll go for the nylon guitar full I'm just going to drag that over to that column there ok so what it's done is it's loaded up this guitar instrument ok this time we haven't actually created a new MIDI track up there ok and we'll go ahead and actually rename that one you guessed right I can type guitar and just for fun let's do one more I'm going to go for keyboards let's go for do well it's a full drag it across ok and then I'll rename it there may be an easy way to do this tell me in the description if you know and we'll call it a whirly not even that whirly typing is my strength can't even see if I've got it right still anyway doesn't really matter so let's turn the metronome off quickly and then let's just play that piano part to refresh ourselves ok cool but now we have these other instruments our disposal which I just want to experiment with so up here where we've got the piano as our output for our MIDI I'm just going to change it to guitar let's change it to guitar try again same part but it's now a guitar and then I'll change it to this whirly to organ how's it going to sound actually I don't mind that at all could be in the beginnings of a new song so that shows the incredible flexibility of MIDI so that should get you started with using MIDI in Studio One and I'll be covering it a little bit more in future episodes where we'll drill into some details a little bit now if you've got any questions at all please do ask in the comments down below and I'll try my best to answer you there now if you did like this video and you found it helpful do make sure you hit the like button that helps me out because it lets YouTube know that it should show other people this video if you didn't like this 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