 Today we're going to be talking about MIDI keyboards and MIDI controllers. Now for some of you who have maybe been watching my videos for a long time or have watched Smiler videos, I used to do a lot more on music tutorials and for years I have had this oxygen keyboard that my wife got me for Christmas many years ago and I love it. It's a great keyboard, it has lots of knobs and dials that I can link to stuff in software. Now it is just a MIDI controller, it does not have a built-in synthesizer which is fine because I want to hook to a computer where I have an unlimited supply of synthesizers and samples to use. And recently my wife and I were talking and we wanted to get my daughter a MIDI keyboard so I looked online and just like the one I have I wanted to get her something that is more than just the keyboard, you know, I didn't care if it had a synthesizer built in but I wanted to make sure it was a MIDI controller that I could hook to my computer so that even if it had built in synthesizers she could still use the unlimited number of synthesizers and samples that we have on a computer. Luckily my daughter already has her own laptop that she has decked out with stickers that I brought her back from Fawcicon this year. So I have LMS installed on there and I looked online and after searching through a bunch of MIDI controllers the cheapest one I could find that had a USB connection and was a MIDI controller keyboard was this MIDI Plus AKM320 it was about $35 and it is a very simple little keyboard. Now I could have just gotten my daughter a toy keyboard but as I said I want this to be something that especially as she gets older and grows that it will grow with her. Now this is nothing fancy here, you know, very limited on number of keys here and the number of controls doesn't have all the knobs and dials that mine have but it does have octave and transposing keys here so even though there's a limited number of keys here she can always go up and down octaves. We have a input slider here which is labeled as volume but it doesn't have to be volume it could be any controller we link it to on the computer and we also have a pitch and modulation wheel which is going to come in handy. So again with a MIDI controller basically anytime you move or press anything on the controller all it's doing is really telling the computer that this input is being pressed or moved and it's going to give it a value of a 128 bit value so it's going to be 0 to 127 inputs so my oxygen keyboard actually has a little display on it that certain slider stuff when I move it tells you what value it is from 0 to 128 and luckily that's just how MIDI works so a lot of times when I've done tutorials on LMS or other types of software that have MIDI inputs people ask me oh is such and such controller keyboard compatible with LMS or RDoR or ZYN add sub effects and the answer is it's a MIDI if it's a MIDI input device and your system detects it then it doesn't matter what software you're using so as long as your system detects the MIDI device and sees it as a MIDI input device then your software will be able to access it so let's go ahead and hook this up so basically in the box for this keyboard with styrofoam packaging a USB cable and an instruction manual which I didn't even really look at I don't believe it came with any CD with software and even if it did I would just throw it out because basically any hardware I buy I throw out the CD because it's usually crapware so I plug in that you saw the lights flash now as I said there's a transpose and octave keys on here and unlike my my oxygen keyboard which has a display that tells me how many octaves I've moved up and down basically if the lights are not on you're centered and if you start moving down you don't know how many octaves down you are but you know that your your octaves are moved down if this one is red and if I go this way a couple of times you'll see that lights up red and the transpose keys light up blue so you'll know if you're not centered on the keyboard there again we have the volume slider here which is labeled as a volume but again we can connect any input same with the pitch in modulation now the pitch will probably leave us pitch and the volume I'll probably link to the volume in LMS for probably the global volume or I can link it to the instrument volume I can also link it to any other slider knob within LMS and here we have the modulation now modulation I'm going to use this for something special for my daughter which I'll talk about in a future video let's go ahead and just see how well this works sorry for any glare on the screen I am going to just load up my default sound font files which I've talked about in a previous video and here I'm going to click on this little gear here and go down to MIDI and input and I'm going to choose the AKM 320 MIDI input so now that I have that I can also click on here to bring up the instrument settings and by default we're at piano so I can start playing here and I can switch through the instruments by changing the patch number here and again this is going to be a value between 0 and 127 which is important as I said MIDI inputs are 128 bit input so we have that 128 0 through 127 so that's important for the next video I'm going to do on this let's go ahead and just talk about the keyboard a little bit more so let's see we have the default piano playing here and so we have the MIDI keyboard links the instrument now just like I linked the instrument to the keyboard I can also link the sliders and knobs to different controllers so now I'm going to link the volume here to the volume on LMS now not to sound like a broken record but again we have one slider on this keyboard which is labeled volume but I can link it anything any of these knobs up here or the sliders up here or if I was to pull these sliders up in the screen I can link into those sliders basically anything that's a knob or slider that has any type of value to it I can link any of the inputs from the keyboard even key presses have a value from 0 to 128 for velocity but I can link them to different controllers but I'm just going to link the volume slider on the keyboard to the master volume up here so I'm going to right-click this and go down to connect to controller and at this point we get this little window here and I can manually choose one but it's automatically set to auto detects now I have to do is slide that slider and you can see we got it says channel 1 controller 8 I can click ok and now you can see the volume knob here is all the way down if I start moving the slider on the physical keyboard let me see if I can get that in shot for you so I can do this so I have that link and again I have this modulation key that I can also do the same thing to for other controls so again with the keyboard default piano here and I can control the volume with the slider here so that's it for the basic setup again lms makes it very easy most applications that have many inputs make it very easy to link any input to any controller on the screen and you have an unlimited supply of samples and synthesizers and you're gonna start playing music so this is rather easy to set up but is my three-year-old gonna be able to set it up the answer is I'm going to set it up so after she clicks on the icon that opens up lms for her everything she needs to do will be done with the keyboard itself so she'll have the volume control but I also want her to be able to choose what instrument she's playing and again there's no instrument button here but I'm going to use this modulation wheel so that she can choose from 128 different instruments just by moving it so that's what we're going to do in the next video just to make it easier for her and there you go you can just start playing music so just like that thank you for watching as always please visit my website filmsbychrist.com that's Chris the K there should be a link in a description also if you feel like you enjoy my videos and you want to become a supporter you go to patreon.com forward slash Melix 1000 become a supporter there if you can't support me financially think about sharing liking subscribing and commenting below all those things help me greatly I thank you for watching and as always I hope that you have a great day and also to see the next video on this tutorial or in this series or all the videos in this playlist there should be a link in the description of this video to the full playlist where you can watch through all the videos that I have on these topics so thank you for watching and I hope that you have a great day