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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.พ. 2025
- itunes.apple.c...
In this video, you'll learn about the basic concepts of iMIDIPatchbay. iMIDIPatchbay is an app that allows you to control your MIDI devices in your musical setup, and it is designed especially for keyboard players. One main feature is that you can send Program Changes to your keyboards and sound expanders. Another main feature lets you easily create split zones on your keyboards and assign your sounds to them. This can be very useful for you, especially if your keyboard doesn't have any built-in capabilities for splitting and layering sounds. And even if it does, there is a big chance that iMIDIPatchbay makes some related tasks a lot easier.
Before we go into the details of the app, let me give you a short demonstration of what this is all about. My example setup consists of a Nord Piano of the first generation, and a Yamaha Motif Rack-ES which is a multi-timbral sound expander. Both are connected via MIDI DIN to an iConnect MIDI interface, which, in turn, is connected to my iPad. With this interface, my iPad can receive the MIDI data from the devices and send data back to them. You can use any other interface that is "CoreMIDI compatible" and that has enough MIDI ports to connect your devices.
The Nord, the Yamaha, and the iPad are furthermore connected to an audio interface for recording this tutorial.
As a first example, I've used iMIDIPatchbay to create a split on the keyboard. On the upper part, I have the internal sound of the Nord Piano, which is an e-piano sound. And on the lower part, I have a bass sound from the Yamaha.
At this point, it is important to note that the Nord Piano itself doesn't have a feature which could send MIDI to the Yamaha when I only play on this part of the keyboard. And, even more importantly, it cannot mute its internal sound on a key range either. The Yamaha, in turn, has some MIDI functionality which I could have used to make the bass sound play only for notes lower than a certain note. But doing that on this small display is really a bit fiddly, and again, the Nord would still play its sound on the lower part of the keyboard.
However, with iMIDIPatchbay, I can overcome these limitations of my sound devices and I'm going to show you how. But first, I want to show you another example configuration. I'll actually switch to another song in iMIDIPatchbay and you'll see that each of my sound devices switch to a different program as a result.
In this configuration I don't have a split as before but a layering. In other words, I play two sounds at the same time across the whole keyboard.
The piano sound comes from the Nord, and the String sound comes from the Yamaha. Well, I also could have achieved that by simply connecting the MIDI OUT of the Nord to the MIDI IN of the Yamaha and, by that, send all notes of the Nord to the Yamaha. But what I wanted in this configuration besides the simple layering, is that the sustain pedal only affects the piano sound, but not the strings.
So, in this case, iMIDIPatchbay is filtering out the MIDI data of the sustain pedal before sending MIDI to the Yamaha. For comparison, let me switch on the sustain pedal now, and I do that just by holding one button here and shortly pressing the sustain pedal, and from now on the pedal will control the Yamaha, too:
Well, these were two little examples. I could have combined more sounds and used more than one split point, but I think you already got the idea of what you can do with iMIDIPatchbay. So, now let me show you in detail how you actually work with the app.
1.1 Concepts
When you start iMIDIPatchbay for the first time, it looks like this. At the top, there is a display showing the selected song, and these buttons here allow me to save the song, make a copy, or step through my songs. However, the most important part of the app is the lower part. These columns here are called "sections" and each of them can be used to send MIDI data to a MIDI device.
Actually, there are two different types of sections. Those on the right side are "extern sections" and they are used to control sound devices that only receive MIDI, like my Yamaha Motif-Rack ES, which doesn't have any keys or drum pads which I could play and which would produce MIDI. It only has a sound engine which can be controlled via MIDI.
So, an "extern section" is used to send MIDI data to a sound device.
On the left side, there are "master sections". In iMIDIpatchbay, a "Master" represents a MIDI device that generates MIDI and that you want to use as a controller for other devices. So in my case, my Nord Piano acts as a master. When I play on it, it will generate MIDI according to the keys that I press, and I'm going to use that to play sounds on my Yamaha for example...
