| MIDI Explained for Guitarists Networking Musical Gear & Using MIDI to Program Multi-Effects Units |
 MIDI Stands for "Musical Instrument Digital Interface" and was a standard created in 1982 for the purpose of controlling multiple synthesizers from a single controller, as well as effects units, and even has it's own music file format standard was well (*.mid). It's basically an interface standard for musical instruments, recording equipment, effects devices, and their communications protocols, interfaces, and cabling that are used to allow musical instruments to communicate with each other.
When you mention "MIDI" to most people, they think of those old Windows "audio" files like "Canyon.mid" that play synthesized instruments over a FM Synthesizer chip on legacy sound cards, which were eventually replaced with mp3s of the actual music people prefer to listen to of course. MIDI music uses a different set of messages from what this page is going to focus on. Very different. Truth is MIDI Is kinda' like a "NETWORK" protocol. Basically put, a lot like TCP/IP - each device on the "network" is given a number for an identity - in this case numbers 0-16 - known as channels. And on those channels, MIDI Messages are sent to communicate between the musical gear. There are two of these messages we would be concerned with when it comes to guitar - Control Change (CC), and Program Change (PC) messages, as well as Bank Change messages in the case of some equipment. Each piece of equipment is assigned a # - like I mentioned. Let's say I have three devices attached, a BOSS Katana Head, a Line6 HD500 floorboard, and a Behringer 2024P. If I have all the deivces on the same channel, then changing a program on the HD500 will change the Program on the Katana and the Behringer - sort of a "global message" of sorts. But if I put each on their own channel, I could control the Katana and Behringer Virtualizer Pro from the HD500 -> so say the Boss is on 1, the Line6 is on 2, and the Behringer is on 3. So I want to call my distortion patch from the HD500 on patch A2 of the HD500....and then call up a Chorus from my 2024p....
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