I've got on old Yamaha keyboard which has some midi ports on it. IIRC (and it was long time ago!) I could hook it up to my Atari 520STFM and write simple programs in ST BASIC(?) to record keys being pressed, and also play it back later.
Son is currently writing music on the PC using a mouse to enter all the notes. Presumably it's possible to connect the Yamaha to the PC to provide an alternative, but what would be required? I can see Midi/USB cables on ebay eg.
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-USB-MIDI-CABLE-KEYBOARD-ADAPTOR-PC-XP-VISTA-MAC-/190410997530
but is that it? Will his (reasonably good I think) software recognise it's there?
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The lad's doing A level music & uses a similar arrangement with ours and his laptop. Software is 'Home' version of Sibelius.
Fairly basic though I think.
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I keep meaning to get one of these for my Casio. USB to MIDI and some sort of software, Sibelius as suggested. is Cakewalk still around? or demo version of Cubase VST?
The one thing to watch out for on these USB-MIDI dongles is the latency.
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Ah yes - I've had a play with a Sibelius demo. Looks powerful, but I didn't really get very far with it, partly because I didn't have anything to compose. Creativity isn't my strong point :)
Son doesn't do his GCSEs till next year, but he's doing music modules at the moment which will count towards the exam. He's using something a bit different to Sibelius, namely FL Studio:
www.image-line.com/documents/flstudio.html
Now I just about worked out how to get started with Sibelius, but FL Studio... well, old dogs/new tricks and all that. But he seems quite at home, turning out stuff like this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pJ8p3erAQ0
which frankly I find amazing. From what he says and what I understand of the software (which isn't that much to be honest) the music is all his own work, entered with a mouse.
Stepson (now 24) took a somewhat different approach for his GCSE music. He's a drummer, and didn't really see eye to eye with the music teacher. So with his guitar-playing classmate they chose for their performance this delightful little ditty:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6ZtHrWiSAk
He got an A :)
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PC/midi keyboard connection - Bromptonaut
