Chances are you may have heard of a “midi” before, but you might not fully understand what it is. In technical terms, MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is a a technical standard for sending/storing musical data.
Perhaps it’s better to first understand what it is NOT. It is not an ‘audio recording’ in waveform, like MP3 files, WAV files, or your grandmother’s phonograph records. Instead, MIDI is closer to sheet music, an ordered list of instructions that can be used to PLAY music. It contains information on exactly what notes to play, how long the notes last, how loud the note should be, what instrument plays them, what tempo the notes should be played at, what key the song is in… the kind of instructions a program would find most useful when it’s trying to play the song itself, rather than just a recording of the song.
Megalovania.mid, visualized
All these features makes it perfect for the purposes of arranging music to be played in Final Fantasy XIV. This is why nearly every bard program uses .mid files to operate.
However, since .mid files are more like sheet music than phonograph records, this means that there is no magic program for converting your favorite songs to midis. Sure, there are programs that CLAIM to be able to do this, but the process to do this is so crude and sloppy that they’re useless for anything but pointing and laughing at.
Hilarious, but no.
Ideally, if you want to create a midi for FFXIV, the best starting place is… an already existing midi. Second best option is using actual sheet music for the song, and your utter last resort is to transcribe the song by ear. For the purposes of this guide we are going to assume you are able to find a midi somewhere online of the song you want, because transcribing by ear is, frankly, not a skill that can be taught (at least not by me). Even most professional musicians find it difficult to transcribe entirely by ear.
In Volume 1, Chapter 2, MidiEditor and it’s upgraded brother ChipMidiEditor are listed as some of the essential tools for editing songs. There are other ways to edit midis, but by far using these tools is one of the most common ways to arrange songs for FFXIV. If you have not downloaded one of these programs, do so now, as you’ll be needing it.
Once you have it downloaded, open up a midi file of your choice and see what it looks like. I’ll be using ChipMidiEditor, which has a slightly different layout than MidiEditor, but for the most part it’ll be nearly identical.
There’s a lot to take in here if this is your first time opening up MidiEditor, but the first things you’ll likely notice are the blue and red bars on the screen. These are the notes, the most important part of your midi file. They are colored by what “track” they’re on, and in this case, we’re looking at a piano piece where the right hand is played by Track 0 (blue) and the left hand is played by Track 1 (red). In a midi file with more instruments, you’ll likely have many more tracks to look at.
If you are arranging for a solo performance, all notes should be in one track, and that track given a name in proper BMP format to tell it what instrument to play and what octave range to read. You can edit the name of your track on the right side of your screen here, giving it a name such as “Harp”, “Lute+1”, or “Piano-1”. If you are arranging for ensemble, each player should get a single track dedicated to their part.
On the right side of the screen you’ll see a tab for “Tracks” and another for “Channels”. Let’s click on channels and see what we find.
A midi contains 16 channels, each capable of playing different sounds from each other. Since a midi contains the instructions on how to play a song, rather than a direct recording of the song itself, it must specify what kind of instrument is playing on a track at any given time. In our above example the midi is a solo piano piece, so there is only one active channel, which has selected “Acoustic Grand Piano” as its instrument. In a large orchestral piece this tab might be cluttered with all sorts of instruments.
Each individual note must specify what channel it is playing on. Notes from one track can use multiple channels to play, even notes playing at the same time. Alternatively, multiple tracks can all use the same channel (which is what is happening with our piano midi above). A channel can also be told to switch what instrument or sound effect is loaded on it mid-song using “program change” events.
Notably, channel 9 is special. All notes using channel 9 play various unpitched percussion noises. If your song has a drum kit in it, the drum kit will be playing using channel 9. For the purposes of solo editing we will be ignoring percussion, but we will return to this topic on in our guide on ensemble editing.
For the most part, bard programs don’t read information related to channels. Instead, they use the name of the track to decide what in-game instrument to play. The exception to this is tone switching for the electric guitar, which uses “program change events” telling channels to switch to different electric guitar sound fonts to know when to switch tones in-game.
Next we’re going to scroll all the way to the bottom of the notes screen.
These are all our non-note events. There’s usually a lot of these at the very start of the midi, and sometimes the occasional one after that.