Lovely to see how creative some LinnStrument players are becoming, also with visuals! External control over the lights with MIDI Note and CC messages really pays off tremendously in this video.
If you’ve never or rarely used the command-line on macOS as a musician … I recorded this tutorial video about SendMIDI and ReceiveMIDI and how to use them on the terminal.
This is a real-time brain dump with a series of tips and tricks that I learned along the years. Hope you find it useful!
ReceiveMIDI is a multi-platform command-line tool makes it very easy to quickly receive and monitor MIDI messages from MIDI devices on your computer.
Following up on my SendMIDI tool, it felt only normal to create a similar tool for receiving MIDI messages. So today I’m releasing ReceiveMIDI, once more standing on shoulders of the amazing JUCE library.
If anything, ReceiveMIDI makes it super easy on MacOS, Windows or Linux to monitor a particular MIDI device and to freely unplug and replug it. There are a series of handy filter commands if you just want to focus on some of the messages, and you can optionally add timestamps. This goes hand-in-hand with an update to the SendMIDI tool that now understands these timestamps, allowing you to play back anything you saved and edited from ReceiveMIDI, with the appropriate timing.
I found a great compact and super stable stand for LinnStrument that I can use while playing other instruments, and sing with a microphone. If you’re interested, it’s the K&M 18825 Equipment stand.
Works both with LinnStrument 128 and LinnStrument 200.
When Leonard Cohen passed away at the end of 2016, I wanted to create a tribute to him. He’s the one who inspired me to be a singer-songwriter, and as a kid I played many of his songs to learn how to finger-pick on the acoustic guitar.
With the LinnStrument being the instrument I co-created with Roger Linn, it felt like a nice symmetry to try to cover some of Leonard Cohen’s songs on the LinnStrument 128 with just one synthesiser as the sound source, very similar to the simplicity of an acoustic guitar. I’m playing LinnStrument on my lap with the right split in strum mode, allowing me to finger-pick the chords on the left split with velocity, while having per-note pitch-bend and vibrato control over the left hand touches. This brings the playing technique quite close to the actually guitar finger-picking of the original song.
The sound comes entirely from the Futuresonus Parva synth, set up as an 8-part multi to match the 8 rows of the LinnStrument. I spent quite a long time fine-tuning the sound of each multi-timbral part to be suitable for that particular note range and playing intent, not unlike each string of a guitar having a different thickness.
This is one of those projects that I worked on for such a long time, that I have no idea if it’s actually any good or not, so I just throw it out there. I plan to record a few more Leonard Cover songs like this if people don’t consider it complete heresy.
After years of muddling around when having to send NRPNs, CC messages, specific Note On/Off messages, and other MIDI messages to MIDI devices … I decided it was time to write a little tool that makes sending MIDI messages from the command line very easy.
So after a couple of hours of work today, here’s SendMIDI, hope you’ll find it useful too!
