I tried to remake my favourite liquid dubstep song for the ever-aging Roland SC-88Pro synth (18 this year!), complete with fancy percussion and a reversed piano effect, because I wanted a challenge. I actually started this in August 2014, got it about 40% done and then lost motivation, and finished it off in the last week. If you like it, please check their other stuff.
The top-left is the 88P’s display, the text below it is every MIDI message (displayed by Bawami, my own MIDI soft-synth), and the background is a view of most of the notes (top part – unfortunately, I couldn’t capture the view of all 128 MIDI notes) and all control changes (bottom part). I’m trying something a little different this time – a smoothly-scrolling piano roll made possible by Sekaiju (the MIDI editor program)’s ability to print the pianoroll view. I used a virtual printer driver (PDFCreator) to print the pianoroll to a series of images, batch-crop (FSViewer) and stitch them together (IrfanView), and then simply pan it at the right speed on the video editor.
This is my new biggest MIDI yet, both in duration and file size (138 KB) thanks to those thousands of expression changes to get the reversed piano effect (simply changing the piano’s attack time did not sound good).
I am working on a dedicated page on my web site for hosting all MIDIs I’ve made for the SC-88 Pro synth and any modified, “general-purpose” versions which I made to make it sound at least acceptable on other synths. Please be aware that it is often very tedious (and sometimes, downright impossible) for me to make simplified versions which sound good, so I don’t intend to make them often. The page will also show the various features of the synth used by each MIDI, for any curious people like myself who find that stuff interesting. It’ll also act as a warning for how bad the MIDI will sound if played on a different synth, since some of my MIDIs are basically built around the 88P.
I have a lot of MIDIs started but very little motivation to finish them recently. Among them are “Verge” (Shimamiya Eiko), “Borderland” (Kawada Mami), “Planeptune’s Theme ver. Re;Birth” (Neptunia), “I’m Not Okay” (My Chemical Romance), “You Are Alive” (Fragma), fragments of various hardstyle songs, and the first one I ever started making for the 88P in 2012: “AirFort-JP Hardcore mix” (Minamotoya). I really have to finish at least some of these some time.