The Digital Conductor for Music and Video

 Picture a movie theater. A door slams shut on screen, and at the same instant you hear the bang. You don’t notice that, and that’s the point. If the sound landed a third of a second late, the whole scene would feel wrong.

Now remember that the picture and the sound were often made on different machines, by different people, possibly in different buildings. Something had to make them agree on what time it is. In music and film work, one of the tools that does it is called MTC, short for MIDI Time Code.

First, what’s “timecode”?

Every frame of a film or TV show has an address, written like a stopwatch: hours, minutes, seconds, frames.

If something happens at 01:15:30:12, it happens 1 hour, 15 minutes, 30 seconds, and 12 frames into the project. That addressing system is called SMPTE timecode, after the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, who standardized it. It’s why an editor can say “the door slam is at 01:15:30:12” and everyone knows exactly which frame they mean.

The language problem

Music software and electronic instruments don’t naturally speak in hours and frames. They speak MIDI, the “paper roll” language from our earlier article, which describes performances in terms of notes and beats.

Film time and music time are different ways of counting. Music counts in beats, which can speed up or slow down. Film counts in real, absolute time, which can’t. A song might change tempo halfway through, but 01:15:30:12 is always 01:15:30:12.

MTC is the translator. It takes film-style timecode and re-packages it as MIDI messages, so music gear can follow a film clock.

The thing people mix up: MTC vs. MIDI Clock

Here’s where beginners get tangled. MIDI already has a way to keep devices together, called MIDI Clock, so why does MTC exist?

They answer different questions:

• MIDI Clock says “here’s the beat.” It keeps devices in step with each other’s tempo, like a metronome. It doesn’t know what time it is, only where the beat falls.
• MTC says “here’s the exact moment.” It carries a real-time address, like a wall clock. It doesn’t care about tempo at all.

If you’re making a band’s drum machine and synthesizer play together, you want the metronome. If you’re making a score line up with a specific frame of video, you want the wall clock. The beat can wander. The door slam can’t.

How the clock gets passed around

One device is in charge, and everyone else follows. (Older documentation calls these “master” and “slave.” Most of the industry has moved on to leader and follower.)

• The leader controls the transport: Play, Pause, Rewind. Whatever it does, it announces.
• The followers listen and lock themselves to it. They don’t keep their own time. They copy the leader’s.

So if a video editor is the leader, a second computer running music software can start, stop, and scrub through the timeline in unison with it.

The leader sends two kinds of messages:

• A steady drip of tiny updates, four per frame, saying “we’re still moving, and here’s roughly where we are.” They’re called quarter-frame messages. Each one carries a small piece of the full timestamp, and a complete address gets delivered every two frames. It’s like reading a long number aloud a few digits at a time instead of all at once.
• A full announcement when things jump. If you skip to the middle of the film, the leader sends the complete timestamp in one message so everyone relocates at once, rather than waiting for the drip to catch them up.

Think of a conductor who keeps tapping out the count while the orchestra plays, and who calls out “bar 112!” every time the piece jumps to a new section.

Why this still matters

Before standards like this, keeping a tape machine, a film projector, and a rack of instruments in step took expensive dedicated hardware and a lot of cabling. MTC moved that job onto the same plain connections musicians were already using, including ordinary USB.

You’ll find it, mostly unseen, in:

• Film and TV scoring, where composers need music to hit specific frames
• Live theater and concerts, where lights, video walls, and backing tracks all need to cue off the same moment
• Broadcasting, where audio can be triggered automatically against live video

So, to sum up

MTC is a shared clock for gear that doesn’t normally share one. It lets film-style timecode travel through MIDI, so that picture, music, lighting, and sound can all agree on what time it is, to within a few thousandths of a second.

MIDI Clock tells the band where the beat is. MTC tells the whole production what time it is. The next time a door slams shut in a dark theater and the sound lands exactly on cue, thank a clock nobody in the audience ever sees.

The Paper Roll That Plays Itself

 Plug a keyboard into a computer, press a key, and a piano sound comes out. It’s natural to assume the keyboard sent that sound down the cable. It didn’t. The cable carried no sound at all.

That’s the part of MIDI that confuses almost everyone, and once you see it, the rest falls into place.

It looks like a file format, but it isn’t

MIDI sounds like MP3 or WAV, a type of audio file. It’s not. MIDI doesn’t contain any sound. It contains instructions.

Think of the player pianos your great-grandparents might have had. They played music by themselves, fed by a spinning roll of paper with holes punched in it. The paper held no music, only directions: as the roll turned, the holes told the piano which keys to press, when, and how hard. The piano made all the sound. The paper just told it what to do.

MIDI is that paper roll, made digital. The name stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and it’s a shared language for describing a performance.

When you press middle C on a MIDI keyboard, it sends a tiny message that says, roughly, “This note was pressed, and it was pressed medium-hard.” Later, another message says “That note was released.” That’s it. Whatever is on the other end, a piece of software or a synthesizer, reads the instructions and makes the actual sound.

Why that distinction matters

A recording of a singer or an acoustic guitar is audio: a captured sound wave, baked in like a photograph. Because it’s a finished picture of the sound, changing it afterward is hard. If the singer hits a flat note, you can’t just grab it and drag it up. Specialized tools can fix it, but you’re reworking a recording, and push too far and it starts to sound strange.

MIDI is closer to the sheet music than the recording. Because it’s only instructions, you can change almost anything after the fact:

• Swap the instrument. Play a melody on a piano, click once, and it becomes a string section, a saxophone, or a futuristic synthesizer. The notes stay the same; only the thing playing them changes.
• Fix a wrong note. Move one note without touching anything else.
• Change the timing. Lengthen a pause, or speed up the whole song without it turning into chipmunks, since there’s no recorded sound to stretch.

The player piano comparison holds here too. You could swap in a better piano and feed it the same paper roll. The performance is unchanged; the instrument is new.

Where it came from

MIDI arrived in the early 1980s to solve a practical problem. Synthesizers from different manufacturers couldn’t talk to each other, so a musician with keyboards from two companies was stuck. The industry agreed on one shared language, and it has barely changed since. That’s remarkable in technology, where most things are obsolete in five years.

Where you’ll find it

Mostly out of sight. MIDI sits underneath modern music production, film scoring, and video game audio. A USB keyboard plugged into a laptop, drum beats tapped out on a tablet, software controlling other software: all of it is a silent messenger carrying a human gesture to a computer that knows what to do with it.

So, to sum up

MIDI is a language for describing a musical performance, not a recording of one. It says which notes, when, and how hard, and leaves the sound to whatever is listening. That’s why it’s so flexible: you can change the instrument, the timing, or a single wrong note without re-recording a thing.

It’s the paper roll, not the piano. And as the player piano showed a century ago, the roll is the part you can edit.

Who Is for the Children?

Mark Twain gave the first Gilded Age its name, and I suspect he would not be surprised that we are due for a second. Gilt is cheap. It looks like gold from across the room.  Chicago is holding an election for its school board on November 3rd. Twenty-one seats. Here is what I found: everyone is for the children.

The Illinois Network of Charter Schools has about five million dollars in its super PAC and has said it will spend up to four million of it. One check was for $1.75 million, from a man who also chairs a charter school operator. The group says its first priority is a board that is independent of the teachers union and the mayor.

Another group, the Common Ground Collective, has spent about two million dollars on ads. Nearly all its recent money came from one billionaire, Michael Sacks, who calls himself a lifelong Democrat and thinks the union has too much say. A third group, Urban Center, wants to prevent what it calls a power grab.

The Chicago Teachers Union says it is not in an arms race with billionaires. That is true so far, in the way a man is not in a race until he hears the starting gun. In 2024 the union did its heaviest spending in the last weeks before the vote, and it won most of what it wanted. Its allies have already put about $305,000 into mailers for one candidate for board president, who is the union's own former deputy political director.

The union that cleans and staffs the schools, SEIU, has started a super PAC of its own. It is backing some candidates against the teachers' picks, and says the board's budget will force midyear cuts that fall on its members. So even the unions are not in one pew.

Every one of these groups can tell you, sincerely, that it speaks for the children. I believe most of them mean it. I also notice that each of them would be paid, protected, or empowered by the result. A charter operator wants contracts renewed. A union wants a majority. A rich man wants a say. Sincerity and self-interest travel together fine. They have shared a wagon for a long time.

So here is a rule from the old Gilded Age that still works. When a campaign says it is for the children, do not argue with the sentiment. Look at the checks.

Then ask each candidate three plain questions. 

1. What will you do about reading and math? 
2. What will you do about the budget? 
3. Who paid for your mailers? 

In my opinion, a candidate who answers the first two with numbers and the third with a name has earned a look.  Early voting is underway. The disclosures are public at the Illinois State Board of Elections. Chalkbeat Chicago has a voter guide. The children cannot vote. You can.

Music will be safe for now

 This is not going to be a traditional book report. In that sense I will go over the book a little bit, and maybe why you should read it, but instead, and surprisingly, this book reaffirmed my belief that in the long run, human made music will still be around for thousands of years, and we will always have musicians who excel at their craft, along with amazing songwriters, performers, producers, and engineers.

This is assuming of course:

• That AI does not kill us in the next decade or so.

• The we further reduce music as only a commodity, and push it away from being art, and just something to be consumed.

That last one is a bit much, and I will dig in more, but first to the overwhelming sense of relief I have after reading this book: Guerrilla Film Scoring: Practical Advice from Hollywood Composers.

For the straight ahead book report, this was a much better introductory book into film scoring than any other I have read so far. It really touches on each area of the process at least a little bit, and puts it in the perspective of a small independent composer and producer. There are not technical discussions of each job, and I would hesitate to really call this a reference book. This is the book that will explain a lot of the language you see in many other places. This is the book that will start to help you put the puzzle together.

Another aspect of this book that was perfect, was the sense of perspective. Guerrilla Film Scoring really is about low budget composing and low budget films. It really makes sure you realize, you the reader, that you probably are not going to start on huge budget films right out of the gate, and that you should have a basic grasp of a lot of things. You need this basic grasp, because you will most likely be doing this and many other jobs at one point in the future, if you embark on this career.

Again, this is a book that has a lot of comments and suggestions from living working composers and game sound designers sprinkled through out this book. This one tends to dole them out in little snippets depending on the subject they are discussing in that particular chapter. I perfectly recommend this book as the one parents buy their kid who might be interested. This is a great start for anyone.

Now, how this book restored my belief in music. In particular it was during the ‘studio recording’ chapter of this book, and it was meant to show and illustrate the differences that you would/ will encounter in the studio. The differences in instruments, the differences in humans, in spaces, etc. It is this exact set of statements that did it for me. It is the thing that a machine can never truly reproduce.

Early synthesizers built sound from raw oscillators, producing tones that sounded flat, sterile, and undeniably synthetic. The very early one’s were monophonic (meaning 1 note at a time), harsh, and sounding very far from the resonance of a real instrument. Decades of refinement in analog circuitry, FM synthesis, wavetable, and physical-modeling slowly and gradually softened the edges on these sounds, but it was the arrival of sample-based synthesis that truly bridged the gap.

Sample synthesis is the capturing (recording) of live instruments and then replaying them as instruments themselves from a keyboard, computer, or other MIDI device. Hans Zimmer has been a huge proponent of this his whole career. Composers, and sound designers could finally reproduce the micro dynamics, variations, and other idiosyncrasies that no waveform from math could replicate.

Even the most realistic patch still demands far more from the producer than simply pressing or programming a note. A producer must put the sound through filters, envelopes, modulation, and other controllers, so much so that, making a synth sound as much like a live instrument takes as much dedication and practice as the act of mastering a live instrument itself. I am not making this as a slight against computer only producers. Truly good one’s are as much a master of an instrument as a cellist, flautist, drummer, etc.

Now, back to our point. Back to this ‘saving of music’ part of this piece. It was this book that once again got me thinking of how many things are involved in the making of music, that are not the note. How a cellist vibrates a note, how and what finger they use. There are so many things each individual player does that are different from every other player of the same instrument, that it is ultimately unique. It is these tiny differences all added together, that gives an orchestra its sound and power.

When I was in music school, I took guitar lessons on the bass from a gentleman named Frank Dawson. Frank Dawson worked with many musicians and bands over the years, including: Marshall Vente’s Project 9+, Sonny Stitt, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, and many others. To me though, he was always Mr. Dawson. Frank Dawson is the person who taught me how all of these idiosyncrasies turn into a signature sound that people know. Not directly at all though. And it took another 20+ years.

When I was in school, one of the groups I played in that Mr. Dawson taught was the Jazz Guitar Ensemble. The idea being 5 guitar players, plus a rhythm section. The guitar players would play like saxophone section in a big band using super-sax voicing. At least that is what Frank called it. I was playing bass guitar, but still reading the bottom rung of the sax section in treble clef. I was the baritone sax if you will.

Every once and awhile we would get Frank on a tangent, but those tangents were still always about music. We would get to talking about tunes, and players, and Frank had this uncanny ability to play anyone. I mean he could sound like anyone. (At least as far as we could tell at the time.) We would be playing through a set of changes, and he would just call out; “Now Sunny Rollins would play it like this”. Boom. Sonny Rollins. “Bird would have said it this way”. Boom. Charlie Parker. This could go on for hours. It wasn’t just jazz players though, he would throw in Steve Vai, Eric Johnson, I mean, you name it. “How Yngwie Malmsteen say it” was always one of my favorites. Not because I was a fan of Yngwie, but it was cool as hell to see this 70 year old guitar master just shred in ANY style.

At the time, I always thought that it was the phrasing, notes, etc. that would make it sound like that person. At the time I never thought it through that it was Sonny Rollins, but it was Sonny Rollins on guitar. Not Sonny Rollins on his native instrument. The one he played on Williamsburg Bridge bridge for a few years, before his comeback with Jim Hall.

It is the notes, and the sax sure, but also his embouchure. How he holds the sax. How he breaths through it. with it. How the notes move one type of quickness from one section to the next. And then the notes themselves. How loud did he play it? Did he blur it into the next one? Was the note hard attack at first, and filter off, or was it swelling into something? Did he play 1, 2 or 3 notes? Were they the same length? Did he take a break in between the notes? We could go on I’m sure, but hopefully the point has been made.

There are so many tiny little idiosyncratic things that a human can do and understand about an instrument, be they real or virtual, that a machine will never truly replicate. I mean, it can mathematically replicate the notes and volumes, but the touch, feel, and sensitivity will never be recreated. There is only one Yo Yo Ma. Literally in the physical sense and in the aural space as well. There will only ever be one as well. No one will ever sound like him again in this world.

This is why music will survive the AI slop-acolypse we are experiencing this decade currently. True appreciation of music will always be a human event with real human responses, to real human emotion expressed by a real human at a particular point in time. This is what makes music a human event, a human activity forever.

Stay Safe Everyone!

Portfolio :: Cyberpunk Demo

Channeling Vangelis for a Blade Runner-Inspired Soundtrack

Building my film score demo reel; one genre at a time.

This one's cyberpunk.

When I first opened this project, it was labeled "Cyberhuman." One word, and I was instantly in Blade Runner territory. That means only one thing: Vangelis. Lush analog synths, that slow cinematic wash of sound — it's a sound I've always wanted an excuse to chase.

So that's what this is: me channeling my inner Vangelis and finally putting some of the vintage synth gear I've collected over the years to real use.

Credit where it's due:

This piece is based on a template from Marika Schanz's film scoring series, a great resource if you're building your own composer portfolio.
🔗 https://www.marikaschanz.com/

🔗 https://1bluebass.com/studio