Several days ago I bought a MIDI controller for my son. At that time, I thought that I would just hook it up to his iPad and let him play along.
Turned out the controller was way cooler than I thought. I”ve been tinkering it ever since. This is my first controller, so I learned a great deal. First of all, being a musician in a digital world requires a lot of reading. It’s harder when you have a MIDI controller then just a regular keyboard. I bought the controller because it was cheaper, about 50% cheaper.
Anyway, so a lot of reading. Fine. You get to know the environment more. MIDI controller is like a computer keyboard. Typing your unconnected keyboard or one on a turned off laptop would get you nothing but that clickety sound. Exactly like a MIDI controller. When you type on a controller, it sends a signal (to an iPad, to a laptop, to space where no one hears you). A controller needs a voice, a sound that it would use to interpret its signal. So next time when you hit a C5 key, it would sing out a Bavarian choir in that particular note. A MIDI controller can’t do that. It needs something else to do it for it. Enter, an iPad/laptop. It takes signals from MIDI then spits out the appropriate note with the assigned sound.
I just want some sound. A lot of the reads I did sent me to the usual software that cost almost the same as my controller. Forget it. I also resisted the urge to use the pirated version, something inside my guts have grown these past years. It’s called a conscience. That thing cost me a pretty penny for Office 2013. I’m intending to write an office 2013 guide book to get the money back 
Right, so the sound. You can install the expensive software like FL or Cubase or something in the same vicinity but I opted for the free version first. Let me digest the coming credit card bill first, then we talk about getting some software. So I looked around for it. I didn’t even know what I was looking for until I came here, a link in Audacity Forum. So I downloaded some of them, until I installed True Pianos. Downloaded and played it. I found out that there’s you can download an audio device called ASIO that reduce the latency significantly compared to the usual Windows Audio. Basically if you have small or zero latency the moment you hit a note in your MIDI controller you immediately hear the sound in your laptop/iPad. So you want a small or zero latency in your thingy, remember that!
Anyway, the day is done, it’s already tomorrow. So I stopped fiddling around with it. I just tried a little with my controller (it’s a Samson Graphite 49, a Mackie-compatible controller-it’s something useful to remember) and stopped it.
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