I have been playing so much music lately. 

It was almost two weeks ago when my new MIDI-controller arrived. I had ordered it over the long weekend and thinking it would be shipped later that week, trekked across country on a slow freight truck, sorted and maybe delivered within two weeks—well, I lowered my expectations. 

It got packed up from a store that had stock on the north side of town, put on a FedEx van the next day and was at my house less than 48 hours later. It was crated in an old Fender guitar box and the lady driving the courier van announced “your new guitar is here!” when I opened the door and seemed ready to come inside, help me set it up and jam. I can’t tell if she was disappointed when I told her it was a keyboard.

I wasn’t.

I had bought a very small and basic MIDI controller a few months back, but it was the literal lowest end model by the same company. It was the vanilla 25 key model with nothing but a USB port and a couple simple UI buttons. It scratched the itch for a while, but only really proved to me that I wanted something a little more robust.

I bought instead 61 key fuller featured model with enough adjacent functionality to keep me busy trying to learn both the tool and the technique—you know, how to actually play the piano—for a few years.

So yeah… between that and the violin music which I need to be practicing for, um, that upcoming concert next month, my days have been very musical.

A MIDI controller is basically just a piano that doesn’t make any of its own sounds. Its guts are limited to sending signals—MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface signals—down a cable to a computer or synth. I have been dabbling in both, and the controller itself came with a list of software encompassing about twenty-five hundred instruments. Each of those twenty-five hundred instruments has enough creative potential to keep me curious and exploring for hours, days, weeks, or even months so I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

And I have been learning the piano, too. Being able to read music, again, helps. I have a couple decades of poking mindlessly at the ivories to back it up, but I’ve focused on working through a technique book and methodically trying to learn hand positions, chords, and articulation. Maybe a fools errand at (nearly) fifty, but I’m having fun.

Of course, I can also plug the controller into the synth. The more advanced model of controller that I bought pairs right up and lets me go much, much deeper on that instrument now that I have a proper keyboard UI for it. Where the software instruments are largely sampled software sounds, the synth is actually generative tones that are created by manipulating raw sound waves through cycling envelopes and filters, wiggling them around with FM passes and modulating it all across a dynamic and configurable matrix of dynamic adjustments. The synth is like hunting for audio in an infinite sea of changing variables, and making music from the result.

All that is to say, I have been playing a lot of sounds in my office, and it is beginning to feel more and more like music.  And I’m having a helluva good time, too.