Make a simple midi

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Author: Lyndon
Posted on 08/02/2004
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F

or all of you that have no idea how to make a midi, how about following these steps to creating a simple yet effective midi.

Firstly, decide on what key you are going to write. For ease, lets be in the key of C major which has no sharps or flats.

Now. The chords that work together are the chords I, IV, V
I means the tonic note of the key, which is C becuase we are in C major key. IV means for up from the tonic note which is the subdominant from the tonic note. In this case it is F becuase F is 4 notes up from C.

N.B the structure of tones are tone, tone, semi-tone, tone, tone, tone, semi-tone, tone. This means that for instance the third note up from C would be a semi-tone. Which it is. E to F is a semi-tone becuase there are no flats or sharps inbetween. (look at the keyboard to see if there are any black notes between E and F). This is useful to know becuase you will understand how to work out scales by using this...anyway...

The next note we need is V which is the dominant of C. This is 5 notes up from C which is G. So we have our structure C,F,G. Now when you play that, it will sound familiar and boring. So there are other roots you can use in the structure. This is the II minor and the VI minor. The second note from C is B and it needs to minor, so make it B minor. the 6th note from C is A, and that also needs to be minor.

So now you have these chords to play around with C,F,G,B min,A min

Start off by putting C as the starting note and C as the ending note in 8 bars. Maybe put a C in the middle (bar 5) to notify that you are still in C. Now, randomly place your other chords in (F,G,B min,A min) until you like the pattern. This will have given you a decent chord structure. For example this is one I just made up off the top of my head whilst writing this, and I know by my knowledge of music theory that it will work

|I |V| II |IV|I | VI |IV|I

Or the chord names

|C|G|Bmin|F |C|Amin|F |C

There you go. You have a bass line. Now you need to make them into chords. The easiest way to do this is the triads formation. a triad is a form of 3 notes stacked to make a chord. The notes are the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes from the tonic note to make a major chord. So to make C major you would have the 1st note which is C, the 3rd note which is E and the 5th note which is G. it will look like this on manuscript paper :-
---------------
---------------
---------------
---O----------
---O----------
-O-

Baring in mind it is fucking hard to make manuscript paper using ASCII XD ! !

So you got your C E and G on the treble clef staff above.

Now for a minor, you have your 1st 3b and 5th. So for instance C minor would be C Eb G becuase the note needs to be flatened.

Now B minor. the 1st note is obviously B, the third is Eb becuase B is only a semi-tone below C which means that it has no flats inbetween C and B. This means that you count 3 whole tones from B and you get... in order from 1,2,3 B,C#,Eb.
The 5th note from B is F# becuase you count 2 semi-tones from Eb (1 tone) which goes Eb,F,F#. So your structure for B major is B Eb F#. But this is major, we want minor so we have to flaten the 3rd which is Eb. You could write Ebb which would be fine, or you could just write D becuase D is the semi-tone below Eb.
So B minor B,D,F# walla. Input these three notes on your staff and you will get the chord of B minor . Try and work the others out for yourself using the 1 3 5 for majors and 1 3b 5 for minors.

Now for a melody. This is where you either have the skill to think of a good melody and compose or you do not. Strictly speaking I always come up with a melody first and then add chords to it, but is just trying to make it simple, so I will tell you what notes you can use when the chord is playing. When the chord is playing C, you can play any notes from C F G in any octave and you can also play B and A which are the 2nd and 6th notes from C. You can also play a 7th if you want. This is called the leading note which is usually followed by the tonic note again Š. Of course you can play around with different notes and see if they fit the type of piece that you are writing, but this is just the standard way. It is the same for any other major chords. you can play I,III,V,VII. So in F, it would be F,A,C,E (face XD). Get it?

Minor chords are a little different. Just play I,IIIb,V,VII(. You can play flatened 7th if you want, it depends on what sort of theme you want.

Now you know what notes you can play when your chords are playing at the same time. Now, here comes the complete unstructured bit. Put those notes in at random using the according notes that I said to play and when but mess around with the timing of notes and stuff. I wouldn't reccomend this way if actually want to create a style, but to "Make a simple midi" it is fine. Try it >:O ! !

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