Happy 30th Birthday MIDI

It is incredible that this standard still meets our needs so well.  Three decades is a millenium in technology years and it is hard to believe an 8-bit serial specification is still running studios and live shows.
 
16 channels was a serious limit, but ports and soft synths get us around that easily.
 
It is fortunate that there are not a billion keys on a piano and that no one plays 128th notes at 9,500 BPM.
 

Very cool man.  I fondly remember my first experience with MIDI as a freshman in high school in about 1988.  I think it was a Yamaha QX5 sequencer on an FB-01 module and Roland TR-505.  After that I had an Atari ST1040 on order but it was delayed so I went with a Roland MC500 instead.  I did alot of gigs on that thing.

...and I was there...
...not so sure about MIDI coinciding with the birth of the net, Arpanet had earlier roots, but I remember DX-7s everywhere, and my smaller, 4 Operator DX-100 was at the core of my first studio...along with two cassette decks, a Peavey 12 channel mixer, a homemade Strat, a Scholtz Rockman, an Alesis Microverb, and a Yamaha PSS-480, with built in drum machine, AND A 1200 NOTE SEQUENCER.
 
Jump back, Cakewalk...1200 NOTES!
 
BOOyah!

To the birth of MIDI (and the demise of DCB).
Does seem time to rethink the 5pindin plugs though...

doncolga
Dude!...love that carpet.

 
The carpet in that pic has gotten a lot of comments over the years. I wish the Goodwill lamp with the "organ pipes" was better visible, but what startles me anymore in that pic is the wood rails on the mixer. Its hard to believe that wood and metal used to be more efficient than plastic. I remember wishing I could afford a PC, but they cost 8 grand back then. I also remember pining for audio sync. MIDI sequencers were available on blue collar salaries back then, but sync to tape required SMPTE and a multitrack deck, and to do that right was somewhere tween $50 and $250k.

My first MIDI sequencer ran on this:
 
http://oldcomputers.net/sx64.html
 
I don't even remember what the software was, but it was really simple.  I think you could have 6 tracks and could quantize an entire track after the fact, but for any other edits, you had to rerecord.  I synced it to an Linn LM-1 Drum Computer and then to the Linn Drum.
 
 
I really wish I could remember the name of the software.  I think Alesis may have made it, but I could be confused since I also had/have an old Alesis hardware sequencer.

I was running an Atari with my DX 7 and a few other pieces.  When we bought our first big computer, a brand new IBM AT in January of 1985, the first thing I did was to expand the memory from 512Kb to 2Mb with an Intel Above Board and then added a MIDI card (don't remember the name, but you had to set the switches to use a free IRQ) to run MIDI with the AT.  Then SoundBlaster came out with a sound card that used a MIDI / Serial port. 
 
And I was 30 then.  Ah memories.
 
Happy 30th birthday, MIDI.  Yes it is mind stretching to think that spec is still around when 99% of the old specs are long gone.

Around mid 1986 I started with an Atari 1040ST with a whopping 4k of ram using Dr. T’s sequencer and a Korg DS-8. I later added a Yamaha TX81Z and a Kawai K1m, I still have both of those! As the song goes "Those were the days"!
 
Happy 30^th MIDI!
　

My first MIDI-capable instrument was a Roland Jupiter 6 in the early 80's. I had nothing to connect it to, though, until a couple years later when I bought a Juno-60 for the express purpose of providing a destination for my one MIDI cable. That allowed me to play two synthesizers at once on stage, which I thought was pretty awesome.
 
Later I went back to the music store where I'd bought the J6, on a weekday when the store was empty save for me and a salesman, who I talked into letting me connect every MIDI-capable synth in the store to one keyboard. I think there were 8 MIDI-equipped models by then, but we only had 6 cables. Still, it was enough to let me go all Rick Wakeman for half an hour until a real customer came in.
 
But MIDI didn't become the intimate friend that it is today until the advent of Cakewalk 1.0. It wasn't the first MIDI sequencer, or even the most popular, but a reviewer in Polyphony magazine thought highly of it (my memory is foggy but it could have been Craig Anderton who wrote that review). On a business trip to Los Angeles I picked up Cakewalk for $73 (list price was, IIRC, $300) due to having made friends with the IT guy at Guitar Center's corporate office.
 
When I got home I bought a Yamaha TG-33. That, along with my stage synths, Cakewalk and of course my trusty 3340S, comprised the core of my first serious MIDI setup.

Jay Tee 4303
 and my smaller, 4 Operator DX-100 was at the core of my first studio...
 

I added a DX100 and a Roland MSQ-100 sequencer to my older Roland SH101, MC202, TB303 and TR606 setup and Joined the MIDI age. I also had a Fostex 4 track cassette tape. You could sync the roland gear to tape, which left a whole 3 tracks for recording and bouncing.
 
I did not start with computers until around 10 years later when I started using Cadenza as a sequencer on Windows 3.1 By that time I has sold the pre MIDI stuff and added a Korg Poly 800, Yamaha TQ5, Alisis HR16, Plus a Yamaha synth card and a Soundblaster with RAM for sound fonts. It still had to be recorded to the Fostex.

John
 
I had a version of Cakewalk for Windows but it looked very intimidating to me. I could never figure it out. It came bundled with my Sound Blaster. LOL

That's where I got my first copy of Cakewalk, and Cubase bundled with something else. When Cadenza went out of business I liked Cakewalk a lot more than Cubase - the rest is history

FCCfirstclass
I was running an Atari with my DX 7 and a few other pieces.  When we bought our first big computer, a brand new IBM AT in January of 1985, the first thing I did was to expand the memory from 512Kb to 2Mb with an Intel Above Board and then added a MIDI card (don't remember the name, but you had to set the switches to use a free IRQ) to run MIDI with the AT.  Then SoundBlaster came out with a sound card that used a MIDI / Serial port. 
 
And I was 30 then.  Ah memories.
 
Happy 30th birthday, MIDI.  Yes it is mind stretching to think that spec is still around when 99% of the old specs are long gone.

can dig...I was running an Altair with my DX7 running software that a buddy of mine from MIT wrote. 

OK, I think that the six-track Commodore 64 sequencer I had was Dr T's and it had a proprietary hardware interface that plugged into the cartridge slot for MIDI In/Out and drum machine sync.  If I remember right, you recorded patterns and then pressed computer keys to trigger patterns and chain them together.
 
I cannot find a screen image on the C64 to know for sure, but this sounds right.
 
I used the portable SX-64 computer and actually made a lot of records this way.  I would show up at the studio with my drum machine, keyboard, and portable computer.  I would plug in and we would record drums, bass, and keyboards that I had already programmed, and then we would start overdubbing real guitars and other parts.
 
The drum patterns were stored in the drum machine and saved to cassette tape so you had to have a floppy disk for the computer sequence and a cassette tape for the drums.  Luckily, the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer and the Linn Drum had enough memory for a whole album or more without resorting to the tape.