This saves a lot of money – you won’t need to buy a full-scale modern USB keyboard. You can revitalize older full-scale keyboards for use with modern equipment.You can connect an older MIDI device straight to your PC, meaning you don’t need an interface that can receive MIDI cables!.So to summarise, you can effectively ‘convert’ your older MIDI devices to those which are USB compatible. Well, even if you don’t have anything you can use with these older MIDI ports anymore, you can actually convert any MIDI device with these ports to one which is USB compatible! Converting Your Old MIDI Device to a USB MIDI Device This short guide will explain how.įairly recently, most MIDI devices have converted their outputs to USB. If you don’t own a USB MIDI keyboard but you do own an older digital keyboard then you can still connect it to your PC’s USB port using a handy MIDI to USB cable. MIDI keyboards are absolutely crucial for modern producers.

It sends MIDI instructions to a computer which then routes them through a piano roll to the software instrument. A MIDI keyboard is simply an extension of this. These blocks ‘tell’ a MIDI software instrument what sounds to trigger. MIDI is strange because we might also think of it as blocks or notes on a piano roll. It’s a file protocol – it doesn’t actually transmit audio, it simply carries its code between the devices that can interpret it. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. MIDI dates all the way back to the 1980s, to the heydays of original digital and electronic music! Nowadays, it helps us connect a huge variety of devices like keyboards and even DJ controllers to computers and laptops.ĭo you remember that 80s, 90s or early 2000s digital keyboard you have lying around? You can actually convert that to a MIDI device connectable to a PC via USB! Read on to find out how! What is MIDI? The wonderful world of MIDI has greatly enhanced music production.

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