Once you start connecting external MIDI equipment, you can start doing some rather more interesting things. Some people, however, may have full-size MIDI keyboards or external synthesizers attached to their PC, myself for example (I have a Yamaha PSR270 and a Yamaha MU10 connected to mine). There’s actually a bit more to the process than my description, but for the purposes of this article, it’ll suffice.

This means that, when you play back a MIDI music file, you’re actually just taking some high quality instrument samples that exist in a hidden part of your operating system, and then stringing them together in the right order to represent the notes you want to play, just before sending that large wave onto your normal sound card audio output.

Most Windows-based sound cards these days have some kind of wavetable synth on them. In this post, I want to show you how to use the other sound generation device that most Windows machines have, the MIDI Sequencer. In a previous post, I showed you how to construct a wave file manually by hand, using nothing but program code.

How to make midi sound real