Midi

The first part of this book opens the door to the world of MIDI.

MIDI has been around for a long time, and there is no shortage of articles, tutorials, and reference documents about it. Yet many of them either stay very superficial or dive straight into technical detail without explaining why things work the way they do. This book takes a different path. It aims to find a careful balance between the everyday, practical side of MIDI and the deeper oncepts that quietly power it all. The goal is not just to show you what MIDI does, but to help you understand it well enough to use effectively om your Electra One MIDI Controller.

To keep things engaging and practical, we will use Electra One as our guide throughout this journey. Instead of talking about MIDI in the abstract, we will send messages, receive them, observe what happens, and gradually uncover the ideas behind them. MIDI becomes much easier to understand when you can see it in action.

Along the way, the MIDI Console in the Electra One web editor will become your close companion. This simple but powerful tool allows you to send and receive MIDI messages just by typing them in. It may turn MIDI from a mysterious stream of numbers into something you fully understand.

All examples in the chapters that follow are written with this in mind. You can copy and paste them directly into the MIDI Console and immediately see or hear the results.

Some examples do not require an Electra One controller to be connected at all. In those cases, MIDI messages can be sent to any MIDI port on your computer and observed using a monitoring application, such as MIDI Monitor on macOS or MIDI-OX on Windows. Many examples, however, will require you to connect the controller and interact with it directly. This is not only more fun, but also more effective. You will be learning MIDI and Electra One at the same time, each reinforcing the other.

We will begin with the basics — what MIDI is, where it comes from, and how it works at a fundamental level — and gradually move toward more advanced topics. Some chapter titles, such as Numeric Systems, may sound intimidating at first. Don’t worry. We will take things step by step, without rushing, and the Electra One web editor will provide tools that make these ideas easier to grasp. At the same time, understanding these concepts is essential if you want to truly understand MIDI as a whole and unlock its full potential.

MIDI 2.0 has only recently—and at long last—started to receive broader attention. In this guide, however, we will focus on MIDI 1.0. The reason is simple: MIDI 2.0 is built entirely on the foundations laid by MIDI 1.0, and those foundations are much easier to grasp.

Once you understand MIDI 1.0, MIDI 2.0 stops feeling like a completely new and intimidating world. With the knowledge you gain here, the newer standard becomes far more approachable.