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Tom Oberheim had introduced his brilliant System, which allowed a drum machine, sequencer, and synthesizer to talk together over a fast parallel bus. Tom feared that MIDI would be too slow. And I remember talking about MIDI at a Chinese restaurant with Dave Rossum of E-mu systems, who said “Why not just use Ethernet? It’s fast, it exists, and it’s only about 0 to implement.” But Dave Smith had something else in mind: An interface so simple, inexpensive, and foolproof to implement that no manufacturer could refuse. Its virtues would be low cost, adequate performance, and ubiquity in not just the pro market, but the consumer one as well. Bingo. But it didn’t look like success was assured at the time; MIDI was derided by many pros who felt it was too slow, too limited, and just a passing fancy. 30 years later, though, MIDI has gone far beyond what anyone had envisioned, particularly with respect to the studio. No one foresaw MIDI being part of just about every computer
The 'USI' or Universal Synthesizer Interface by Dave Smith (1981)
- Curtis Roads: "Computer Music Tutorial" Chapter 21
MIDI Representation of Pitch (...) mandates that these pitches be equal-tempered (...) they can be bent by means of the pitch bend message (...) A problem (...) is that it is a global operation that applies to all notes assigned to a given channel
From the start it seems LSB/MSB pairs of controllers was there since C.Roads mentions it. (0-31 (MSB) + 32-63 (LSB) are coupled in this way) What's interesting is that since MIDI as no sense of a bundle, you can transmit the MSB first and get some small jumps in theory
limitations can be grouped into three categories: bandwidth imitations, network routing limitations and musc representation limitations
- MIDI 1.0 Detailed Specification.pdf 4.2 says:
The Control Change message is generally used for modifying tones with a controller other than a keyboard key. It is not for setting synthesizer parameters such as VCF cut-off, envelope decay etc. There are exceptions to the use of the Control Change such as the special Bank Select message and the RPN/NRPN messages (listed below)
A manufacturer wishing to control a number of device-specific parameters over MIDI should used non-registered parameters numbers and the Data Entry controllers (Data Entry Slider. Increment and Decrement messages) as opposed to a large number of controllers. This alleviates possible conflict with devices responding to the same control numbers unpredictabily.