MIDI: Piano

In our fifth and final post exploring the various ways forScore can connect to MIDI devices and provide some unique capabilities, we’ll be looking at one last feature that exposes a fundamental detail of MIDI: the ability to produce sound.

MIDI messages describe musical events like when you’ve pressed a note and how hard, but these messages don’t transmit any actual sounds. That’s why many MIDI devices are called “controllers” and only describe how you’ve played, not what it sounds like. A synthesizer is the piece of equipment or software that actually produces notes based on those instructions.

Since forScore already includes a software instrument, the piano keyboard, it can fulfill that role and play notes as you use your MIDI device. Of course, your device may already produce sounds or you may have a different synthesizer you’d prefer to use. In that case, just open the MIDI section of forScore’s settings panel and uncheck the “Synthesizer” option. You can also disable the ability to send commands or receive shortcuts here if needed.

That wraps up our exploration of forScore’s MIDI integration. As we said way back in part one, MIDI is much more than a single feature, it’s a full language that can be used to enable a whole lot of interesting capabilities. If we missed one, let us know so we can keep building useful features! Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back next week with a completely unrelated Feature of the Week.