Hi,

I’m new to the keyboard world: I’m a singer and an acoustic piano player. But I just bought an MM8.

This may be a very dumb question, but how do I select the voices that playback the MIDI files from my USB storage device?

And please, break it down like you’re talking to a five-year-old. Because I have no idea what I am doing.

Thanks in advance!

The short answer is: You don’t.

The file that you are playing back was (presumably) created by a person somewhere (we’ll call them the Author). The Author made the selections for the VOICES you hear playing by inserting coded messages into each TRACK of the Song (file).

In order for you to change what instrument is selected to play on a specific TRACK, you would need to edit the Author’s work.  This means you would have to “open” the file in a MIDI Sequencer. The type of messages are called “BANK SELECT” and “PROGRAM CHANGE”. These dual messages tells the receiving instrument what BANK to choose, and then within that BANK of sounds, which individual sound (called a “VOICE") to choose.

These coded messages are responsible for selecting the VOICE that plays a particular musical part. Say on track 1 the Author selected a FLUTE sound; they would embed in the track data, a coded messages that will select a FLUTE on the receiving product. If the Author selected an Electric Piano Voice for Track 2, they would then put a coded message that would tell the receiving product to select an Electric Piano. These coded messages for VOICES are the PROGRAM CHANGES - and the Author had to select a Voice for each Track. They also have messages that tell it how loud to play (Volume), whether to come out of the left, right or center (PAN) of the stereo field, etc., etc.

All of these coded messages are contained in the first measure of the SONG file - so that when you press PLAY on the sequencer to playback the file, the first thing the tone engine receiving the data does, is respond by selecting the Author’s selections.

The MM8 while it is able to playback MIDI files, does not give you the ability to EDIT these messages on-board the MM8. You must do this editing on a computer - using the software that was probably included with your MM8 (Cubase AI)

If you open the .MID file in Cubase, you can learn about how to EDIT the data in the file, and how to select the instruments that you want. Take you time, Editing MIDI data is an advanced function, but is definitely do-able… with the help of your computer.

Thank you. This is perfect!

I actually authored the file using notation software. And I just learned about GM and MIDI formats. Thank you manuals, google and wikipedia. So editing the midi file using Cubase will be a breeze… as soon as I figure out how to use the program.