MIDI files of songs you want notation for?

Notation
#1

As you might know, or don’t, me and Libor on the forum are working separately on a Shamisen notation editor. He is making the actual editing part, while I am currently working on importing MIDI files and analyzing its contents and generate shamisen notation for it.

If you have MIDI files of any song you have trouble learning, please share them with me and I’ll use them in my program. In the process I will get more good example files to test, and you can get a basic notation from it. Currently it’s only text output and doesn’t show the tempo. In its current state it can at least help you if you can’t pick up all of the notes that are played.

#2

Hi Karl,
I’m excited about this project you and Libor are working on, and I’m sure a lot of other people are too. I wonder if you didn’t get any replies to this because people (like me) don’t quite know what you are asking for. I only have a vague idea of what a MIDI file is, and have no idea if I can create one from an existing audio file. I could send you any number of shamisen audio files (I keep wanting to type “audiophile” there) if there is a way for you to convert them.

#3

Hey Gerry,

I thought that maybe I should have explained what MIDI is but I was kind of in a hurry when I created the topic!

Ok so for explanation of what MIDI is, here goes:

In general, MIDI is a communication protocol for audio devices. It’s not only for playing songs, but is also to control various devices from another device. When you connected a keyboard (piano, not the thing I’m typing on now) to your PC you would do this using a MIDI cable connected to your soundcard. After you had done this you could play notes on the keyboard and the computer would get them and could for example record them into the software run on the computer. You could then save this information in a MIDI file.

So back in the day before the MP3 compression of an audio file was created there was a need to distribute music without taking space. This was before the Internet was fast and widely used and we used floppy disks. The way that you could create music was that your soundcard was equiped with a way of synthesizing a whole range of instruments (including shamisen (!), but pretty badly now that I have my hands on one). Since the soundcard in your computer already knew how to make shamisen sounds, all you had to do was to give it information on what note should be played and at what time.

This is essentially what a MIDI file that is distributed contains. What instruments should be played at what note and at what time.

There is also other formats like the MOD formats, where you included a small compressed audio sample in the file that you would use to play the notes. That takes much less space than storing a perfect audio copy. But nevermind that :slight_smile:

When I was younger and there was no MP3, I used to listen to Beat It with Michael Jackson and the Ghostbusters theme etc in MIDI format. Those were the days :wink:

There are programs that can analyze audio files and create MIDI from them, but I have not spent much time with them as I’ve rarely see them be accurate enough.

MIDI is still around today, and even if you are used to using a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) like Cakewalk Sonar, Cubase or others, you are essentially using MIDI. Today you have advanced software that uses samples that you can connect to the MIDI. If you listen to some modern electronic music, it has been made using MIDI.

So, there are probably a lot of MIDI songs out there of music that you all like. Personally most MIDI music that I use is from old games. You can find a lot of them (including MOD formats of games as well) at http://mirsoft.info

Man this wall of text will give me even less replies :smiley: Kyle sent me a couple of songs which I will put into my program soon. I just finished my key analyzer after learning some stuff about harmony series and virtual pitch. My head is about to explode.

#4

For a while now many musicians/bands have been creating MIDI versions of their albums before actually going into a studio and replacing the information with real live instruments. When EMI released my CD back in 2009 that is exactly how we recorded it.
But regardless of that,this notation program you guys are working on really sounds fantastic.
Mike Penny and I have been scetching out our etudes and various other written works for Shamisen for a while now but mostly in old fasioned manuscript form…and when Kyle and I worked on the Kodo score I had to rely entirely on Kyle to translate my transcription into the spiffy result that eventually surfaced here on bachido. So needless to say this is an area where I am thinking I may be bugging you guys from time to time to learn more about what you guys are accomplishing here. For now I more or less get the idea of what you are doing so I dont really have any questions but I think if I were to evolve my capacity to notate, print and create more up to date presentations of Shamisen music and what players like MIke and I are creating (etc.) I will be very grateful for you guys effort (I mean I am already grateful that you are putting thought into this)
So please stay encouraged and keep in mind that people like me and others in this community take this kind of evolutionary work to be of great value.

#5

Thanks for that explanation, Karl - it really cleared things up for me.
So I guess you are looking for MIDI files from other genres to see how to map them on to shamisen, right?

#6

Yeah that’s right. I’ve got lots of MIDI files on my own to try it with but I thought I might as well ask on the forums if someone has that song they have problems learning.

#7

Hello (^_^)//
I bought a shamisen recently and try to transcribe some songs and I’d like to know the advancement of the project;

Thanks

#8

Hello! I haven’t worked on this particular project for a year. Most songs can’t be transcribed on the shamisen without making changes to the song like omitting notes or playing them with octaves changed. I’ve found that many songs doesn’t suit the shamisen and that those that do you have make these compromises. In that case I think you get a better result by doing it manually.

I’m sure a program can help you do it but for me it’s easier to do it manually by looking at the notes in a DAW.

#9

I have the fortune of including in my musical taste also music from games that had their commercial potential decades ago and many are now abandonware, thus there are plenty of midi files available from fans.

Think many of the old themes would be quite simple to play (8 bit computers weren’t really that capable), but also many contain tracks for several instruments - at this point I’d be looking just to extract the main theme.

Have you planned to share your software under a license?

I could hunt for a few more suitable MIDI files and put them to dropbox etc if you still want to work on this.

#10

Karl, if you need an additional dev, I could offer some help. I’ve been working for the past couple years on a dynamic creative systems with genetic algorithms and some machine learning to compose music. It’s mainly in python with some C hooks, but I do have experience with dealing with MIDI and other formats.

I was actually thinking of feeding the machine learning algorithm some shamisen parts to see if it could find some “inspiration” to create japanese-style music.

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