PE6_Garageband-Midi files

After having a look at what Michael George had done with his exploration into Garageband on his blog I felt inspired to have another look at one part of Garageband that I hadn't even thought of that could be useful to me. It is the capability of Garageband to import midi files.

As Michael reported in his blog, back in the late 80s and 90s, composers used their computers to record their performance using midi. They would plug their keyboards into their computers and play. The computers would then take that data and play their synthesizers. Today our computers are so powerful that we can have many synthesizers living in the computer so there is no need to run external synthesizers. (Some composers still do only to free up their computers processing power as the virtual synthesizers can be fairly hard on CPU usage) The computer still records the performance and saves it as midi data but now it plays the synthesizers internally.
Because I am a bit of a fossil I still have many of the songs I wrote back in the 80s and 90s in midi files but don't have any of the equipment any more (I have some but not like I used to) so I thought that this might be a great way to bring back some of those songs from the grave (how Halloween of me!)

I loaded the midi file by dragging it onto the work area of Garageband and right before my eyes it appeared. The tracks even had the names of the instruments I used but, unfortunately, its attempt to match wasn't so good.

My bass came up with an Alto sax sound and my choir, an acoustic guitar. It did, however, recognize that all the percussion parts were percussion and assigned them a drum kit.
Another great thing about Garageband is that it has heaps of instruments in it so I decided to see if I could find a bass guitar and a choir that would work for this song. I also wanted to see if I could find some lead synthesizers as well.

 This muted bass looked like it could work and I found a sound that I know is a choir type sound called Bondi Breath. (similar to a sound that came from an old Australian synthesizer called a Fairlight)
It sounds okay but the cool thing is that I also have some emulations of synthesizers I used to own back in the day so I can actually have some of those original sounds.

I can also have some newer synthesizers that have only ever existed as virtual instruments.

I'm not really sure about the sound. My memory is arguing with me about wanting it to be exactly as it was but I'm willing to give it a go and I suppose this is all about trying to make things new and not about resurrecting the dead.
Oh well I suppose I had better keep on with it. Thanks again Michael, for the inspiration.
See You next time
Peter
PS iLife 11 came out yesterday and there are some very cool new tools to play with in Garageband and iMovie so it looks like any spare time is about to go west! (What spare time you say!)