It may have been announced in 1983, but it was in the mid-to-late ‘80s that MIDI really started to have an impact in bedroom music production circles. By then, we had the Atari ST, a computer with built-in MIDI ports, and software sequencers that were capable of taking advantage of them.
Plus, multitimbral synths were getting more affordable, so it was possible to buy just one keyboard and use it to create a complete arrangement.
Which brings us nicely to 1990, when MIDI music-making was established enough to warrant an appearance on BBC 2 - at the time, one of just four terrestrial TV channels in the UK.
In a segment presented by Kate Bellingham and recently posted to the BBC Archive YouTube channel, we see a digital musician, Clive Williamson, demonstrating how he uses just an Atari ST running C-Labs Notator - the forerunner to a little-known DAW called Logic - and a Roland D-10 (a cutdown version of the D-50) to create a new-agey piece that shows off the synth’s familiar ‘80s soundset. The show is called Techno, but the music definitely isn’t.
‘Electronic keyboards”’ like this, explains Bellingham, can be found in “any reasonable music shop,” while Williamson is billed as a man who “composes music and sells his own tapes”.
When asked by Bellingham if a great deal of musical expertise is required to make music using a setup like this, Williamson replies that precisely the opposite is true. “I love MIDI because you don’t have to have a great deal of knowledge - you just have ideas.”
Despite this being an explainer video, there’s some familiar confusion about where the sounds are being generated - at one point, Williamson mistakenly says that “the piano sound is coming from the computer”; he later gets it right when he says that “all these sounds we’re hearing are coming from one synthesizer” - but it’s towards the end that things really take a turn for the bizarre.
After explaining that MIDI enables you to use multiple digital instruments together, William pulls out his “digital horn” - something from the Casio DH range, we think - before inviting Bellingham to jam over his Notator tune on her oboe while he plays the flute, an instrument he was inspired to take up after getting into MIDI music making. Fellow Techno presenter Mat Irvine is also roped in to play MIDI guitar (used to trigger the strings, we think), and then the whole thing just ends as the camera pans out.
It’s all gold, and we can’t help but think that Williamson, Bellingham and Irvine’s trio was the inspiration for The xx, who formed some 15 years later.
