#5 Arranging

Midi offers tremendous arranging benefits. Let's say that you wrote the song with no drums in the first chorus, but changed your mind. In Cubase SX3, you select the part you want (in this case the drums from another chorus) hold ALT and drag the part over to the desired location. Cubase copies the midi for the drum part over to the first chorus. Easy! You may need to adjust the feel of the drums or the velocity (how hard the drums are being "played" by the midi) but you will now have in time drums for your chorus. That takes about 1 second.

Arranging with midi is this easy for just about every situation. It's not uncommon for me to grab the midi bass and copy it to a new midi track. In fact, I did this yesterday on a song. I took the bass track, pulled it up an octave, and then pulled various notes up another octave, and then used that midi to trigger a violin sample. The trick worked out great!

Conclusion

Midi offers powerful benefits when a person is working alone and wants to finish a song in one night. It's entirely possible for one person to create a full blown hit song in one night with minimal gear, a mouse, and a midi keyboard. Midi offers tremendous creative benefits when writing such as the ability to easily manipulate tempo, the key of the song, the arrangement of the song, etc. Midi allows you to try things you may not have tried because it would mean you would need to retrack the entire song.

Don't get me wrong here. The old fashioned way of writing is still effective, but the possibilities are opened up greatly when using midi. If you have an amazing band behind you, you may not want to program drums and bass with a mouse. However, if you've ever felt like your band didn't quite do your creative vision justice (I know, drummers aren't the best listeners), midi is a highly effective alternative.

If you are interested in getting into midi, feel free to ask as many questions as you'd like on the midi sequencing forum.

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