Make your own backing music

This is a great way for buskers and pub performers to make their own backing music absolutely free rather than paying for the service. With this method you can create your own great sounding backing tracks for your performances without having to have any musical skill or knowledge whatsoever. To do this we utilise freely available midi (musical instrument digital interface) software and files to work with.

It basically works using this step-by-step procedure:
1 Get a music score or sheet music from your local library or online
2 Copy the position and duration of the notes into a midi notation editor
3 Play about with the different instuments to creat the desired sound
4 Save as midi music file or convert into mp3, wav or wma audio

Midi is the format used by all electronic keyboard manufacturers and is the standard universally compatible format. Electronic keyboard manufacturers use midi to create different instrument sounds to play on the keyboard and to add pre-programmed music tracks to their equipment.

Midi is a very small file, taking only a few kilobytes of memory as opposed to many megabytes such as mp3, wma and wav. This invariably means that you could store hundreds of midi files in only a few megabytes of storage. For example just one standard cd-rom can store thousands of midi files; so a 4 gigabyte memory stick will therefore hold millions.

The biggest advantage is that although only small, many midi files will still offer great instrumental sound quality. I say instrumental because midi is not able to work with vocals.

The basic procedure in a little more detail:
1 Using your normal public library membership you can borrow sheet music or music score books to read and use at home for no cost. Alternatively you can sometimes download sheet music for the tune you require, search the title of the song or tune and free sheet music into a decent search engine such as Google.


Noteworthy Composer in action

 2 You will need to copy the music into a midi notation editor (I recommend Noteworthy Composer, it's free and does the job quite well. Once downloaded and unzipped click on NWC32 to use). A midi notation editor will show you the standard five horizontal lines close together that is used for music composition, just copy what you see on the sheet music or music score. This is easy to do but can be somewhat time-consuming and you will need to pay particular attention to detail.
Alternatively you could download a pre-recorded midi file from the internet and edit it to your requirements. Search for the name of the tune followed by mid or midi in a good search engine.
3 Standard midi notation will use piano type sounds as the default so you may want to change this to different instrument sounds to create the desired effect. Pre-recorded midi files will also load into the notation editor with ease. Your notation editor will make changes easy to do. Not only will you be able to edit the instruments but also the tempo, pitch and many other aspects.
4 Once you have what you want you can save the result as a midi file for use later. If however you wish to play it back using standard audio playback equipment you will need to convert your midi file into a different audio format such as mp3 or wav, there are plenty of free downloadable applications that will do this for you.

I will be releasing a tutorial eBook and accompanying tutorial videos that will take you by the hand and guide you through the exact procedure. Look out for them soon.