November 29th, 2010 by Admin

Music is a divine gift to humanity and we all would love to sing well. We all may not aspire to be professional singing idols but we all want to improve our singing to at least avoid embarrassment in front of friends, family and colleagues. Our voice is a tremendously powerful and delicate musical instrument that can be trained to perform well.

Just like you take care of your instruments you need to care for your voice as well. Voice is in fact an incredibly complicated instrument which works in combination with vocal chords, tongue, lips, teeth and diaphragm.

Improving breath techniques can really help in controlling your pitch, timber and volume of your singing. Here are some techniques that can help you improve your singing voice and its range.

• Breathing exercises to make your diaphragm stronger is the key to improving your voice range. Diaphragm is the muscle that allows us to hold air and more air we hold the more sound we can produce. Basically ability to sing louder notes and projecting voice further depends on a strong diaphragm. So carry out daily breathing exercises for two to five minutes. Good breathing habits will help you improve your vocal techniques considerably.

• Next step in improving your singing is to control your pitch and voice throw. This can be done mainly by training your ear to listen to music carefully simultaneous to training your voice. Relative pitch is nothing but a singer’s ability to repeat a series of notes exactly as he/she hears it. So how do you train your ear and voice together? Listen to music carefully and then learn to sing it depending on your ear to guide you. Learning anew song after listening to it repeatedly or repeating a particular vocal exercise can help you to train your ears so it can guide your singing.

• Next step is to improve your singing techniques. Some vocal and singing techniques you need to concentrate on include resonance which means sustaining as well as fading out notes, vibrato or vibration of sounds, crescendo, tone, diction or clarity of pronunciation, placement and vocal flexibility. If you wish to sing professionally then definitely you need a singing coach or tutor to improve your singing.

November 14th, 2010 by Admin

MIDI is the acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface which happens to be standard protocol for communication between different musical devices. It is also used for communication between computers and variety of musical devices. Many types of devices used MIDI technology for communication and they range form mobile phones, music keyboards to your PC at home. They all understand and communicate in the language of MIDI. What is the language of MIDI you may ask?

It works a lot like music sheets do in explaining each note and tempo of music to be played. MIDI messages can describe musical notes to be played, exact time when an instrument is to be played and duration as well as tempo and volume of music to be played. Thus, MIDI data is a set of performance instructions and not digital sound recording.

This means the quality of performance may be changed by changing one note or entire tempo or use different instruments to play the song in a complete different manner.

MIDI data is either transmitted electronically between musical devices capable of understanding MIDI language or stored for later playback. Just as performance of a person depends on his/her proper interpretation of music sheets, performance of receiving devices depends on how well the device can comprehend MIDI data.

A complete MIDI signal can contain as many as sixteen channels with each carrying independent messages to individual devices. Each individual musical device tunes into a channel somewhat similar to the way your television tunes cable channels. Some instruments are capable of responding to more than one channel.

Such devices are known as Multitimbral. MIDI cable is a five pin plug at both ends to connect different devices. MIDI In jack receives signals form another instrument or device while MIDI Out jack carries messages generated by the device to other devices. Now what are MIDI messages? MIDI technology converts each performance gesture like note you play, how hard you play and for how long and others into a series of events and messages each having a specific meaning.

These messages are then transmitted from one device to another. MIDI interface deciphers signals from musical instruments and translates them into a form that a computer can understand.