#ADDICTIVE DRUMS MIDI NOTE NUMBER HOW TO#
#ADDICTIVE DRUMS MIDI NOTE NUMBER SOFTWARE#

“There is no industry standard for numbering octaves. Just to be different, Cakewalk eschews both conventions, and shows note number 60 (middle C) as “C5” in their Piano Roll View. Voxengo SPAN, however, displays ~262 Hz as “C4”, following the Roland standard.

#ADDICTIVE DRUMS MIDI NOTE NUMBER SOFTWARE#

Since then, instrument and music software manufacturers tended to pick one of the two conventions and ignore any subsequent confusion on the part of the users.įor example, XLN’s Addictive Drums follows Yamaha’s convention, and in their documentation and note maps, they use “C3” to refer to note 60. ascending notes would be A4, B4, C5, D5, etc.)Īnd everything was cool… until Yamaha used “C3” to represent note 60 in their own MIDI documentation. With ten and a half octaves covered by our 128 possible note numbers, back in 1982 Roland documentation writers chose “C4” to represent Note 60, middle C, and to enumerate octaves from C to B (.e.g. C, D, E, F, G, etc, instead of those confusing and non-obvious numbers. If you’re used to conventional Western musical notation, it makes sense to refer to notes using the alphabet notation of the scale. Secure in the knowledge that our instruments – both physical and virtual – will respond with middle C if we sent them a MIDI Note Number 60, we can move on to note names. MIDI messages get complicated quickly, and there are better places to go if you are curious about the details. The synth module will continue to play that note until it receives a follow-up “Note Off” message for the same note number.Ī message here, a message there, and pretty soon you’re playing yourself a tune. For your typical instrument using a standard Western 12-tone scale, note number 60 will result in a tone of 261.63 Hz, or “Middle C”.

#ADDICTIVE DRUMS MIDI NOTE NUMBER HOW TO#

Your synthesizer uses these numbers to decide how to respond: which note (pitch) to play, and how to set the volume or tone for the requested velocity. The velocity will also be between 0 and 127, where 0 is the lightest possible touch, and 127 represents the most force you could use. For example, the note number will be between 0 and 127, representing the lowest and highest possible notes respectively. how strongly the note was played (known as note “ velocity“)īecause the numbers are 7-bit digital, there are 128 possible values.In addition to a number identifying the message as a “Note On”, it will include two additional numbers representing: For example, if I want an instrument to play a sound, I need to send it a specific type of message: a “Note On” message. MIDI signals are digital, so everything is represented by numbers. If your synth is a module in a rack, or your keyboard is responding to signals sent to it over the MIDI cable from your sequencer, it gets a little more interesting. How does your synth know what note to play, when you press a key? If it has a built-in keyboard, then the glib answer is, “whatever key I’m pressing!”.

Addictive drums midi note number