Editing is easy (you can literally drag notes around). You can change the sound of the instrument with ease. MIDI id popular because it’s extremely malleable. The software is housed in a program like GarageBand, Ableton, Xpand, etc.

This means it controls the MIDI instrument, which in this case is a piece of software. A MIDI keyboard is often a MIDI controller. When we talk about instruments, we’re not always talking about hardware. These messages are interpreted by a MIDI “instrument” to create sound. Rather, it’s a series of electronic messages like, “note on, note off, pitch bend, modulation increase,” and so on.

It was developed in the 1980s to allow digital instruments to communicate. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It’s worth taking a moment to understand what “MIDI” is.