So I've made a little TikTok that hit 3.5 million views, making me an international star... Not at all. I mean, yes, I've made a 3.5 million views TikTok, but no, I'm not an international star obviously. It won't take long tho. So actually I made this video on TikTok a few weeks ago: The video went viral quite quickly, reaching over 3.5 million views on TikTok. It'spretty amazing, and moreover it was shared on several Instagram accounts, making it even more viral than it already was. Which is pr
etty amazing in the end, I didn't expect this at all it's awesome! But of course who says a lot of visibility, a lot of views, says a lot of comments. And in these comments, I obviously received a significant amount of comments that were a little bit hateful, claiming that I'm a liar and that this is a fake. "You don't know anything about it." [Intouchables] So why am I making this video? For two simple reasons, the first one is simply to prove that it's not fake, that what you hear is what you
see. Or reciprocal proportional or equal to the hypotenuse of the square of the lesser, obviously. And the second reason is simply to show you how I did it; little tips if you want to try to do the same thing. And at the end of the video, I'll just do one myself. A simple one of course, I'll probably go for a geometric shape, a star or something, just so you can see the base a little bit, so it gives you a reference, That will might help you more than the explanations I'm going to give you to st
art making your own. Here you go! So first of all you should know that if you hear MIDI drawing, MIDI art, musical drawing etc., it's all the same thing. What does MIDI mean? It's an acronym that stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. (Yeah I'm bilingual, yeah) and it's a communication protocol that allows a lot of digital interfaces that are dedicated to music to communicate with each other. - "Hmm hmm.." [Inspecteur le Blanko] So for example, this is a MIDI interface, this is a MIDI
interface too, my sound card is also a MIDI interface (among others), this keyboard too :) ... And of course the MIDI protocol is also used internally directly in music softwares. But what's the use of MIDI information, eh? You have to know that we can do a lot of things with MIDI information. For example, on a Launchpad, you can manage all the light of the LEDs under the pads. We can change their color, trigger them when we want at certain times, turn them off etc. There are obviously many oth
er things you can do but I'm only going to focus on the musical aspect here. So to make it very simple: what happens when I press this key? As you can see, this is not a real piano, there is no sound coming out of this instrument, there is no audio signal, There is only a MIDI signal coming out of it. If I connect only this keyboard to my computer and on my computer I have a virtual piano for example, if I press this key, the virtual piano will know that it has to play a C of this octave, with t
his intensity, and play this note until I release it. There's other information that comes into play, such as the sustain pedal, but you can imagine that we're only interested in "how do we write music with this protocol?" And basically, it's all about this kind of time grid on which we can draw notes, assign them a certain velocity, length etc. etc. Now a little historical parenthesis because... You have to give credit where credit is due. You have to know that I did not created this concept of
musical drawing / MIDI drawing, it's already several years old. The first one I discovered was in 2017, by the artist Savant, who had made a bird in the rain which was really stylish, check this out : And so why did I start doing that again four years later? In fact, I went back to the first ones I made that I thought were nice and I said to myself: "Hey, it might be a good idea to use this concept again but this time to do it with internet memes." And here I did this one first and it hit the s
pot, it's pretty crazy. - Excuse me?.
- What? - It's a little bit long!
- Yes, no, but... - If you can get to the heart of the matter, that would be great! - Yeah, you're right, come on, let's get busy... LET'S GO. Here is the famous Table Cat Meme MIDI Drawing project. So first of all what I'm going to show you is the content of the project with a quick presentation. You'll see that there's almost nothing. So I'll start by showing you this, which is simply the instrument that allows me to have
the piano sound. And that's all. End of the video, ciao! *PROUD OF HIS JOKE* Then there are two little things that I simply added which are the insert effects. So you have first of all a compressor, here, and then a little limiter, so that you have a nice level of listening that's sufficient and doesn't clip. Another thing here, I show you if you wonder, it's my small plugin which allows me to route the sound of Cubase directly in OBS. - "Bahhh uh I don't give a fuck." [Palmashow] So, we have a
synth, two small effects and that's it.
Also, here you see the tempo of the project which is 30 bpm, I set it to 30 because I started to make the MIDI drawing actually very narrow and it was going way too fast, I could have done it at 120 bpm and multiplied by four the length of the drawing but it's exactly the same. So first, let's talk about velocity. You'll see the "velocity" thing on any software that deals with MIDI, which is basically the intensity of the note. On most software now it's a
standard, it goes from 0 to 127. So let's check the first note for example, its velocity is 107. If I turn it all the way up, it's now 127, the note is bright red like this and it sounds very rough, and if I go down to 0, the note is blue and there is no sound, when I click on it nothing happens at all. So you can see already as I had shown on the TikTok video where I had explained this, there are no blue notes here, so theoretically you can hear absolutely everything. You can see that there are
notes that are a little bit darker than others. They were non-harmonic notes so I tried to make them a little bit audible but not too much, because otherwise it was a bit dissonant. So I tried to make it sounds as good as I could, but without having any blue notes because otherwise it's obviously a bit of a cheat. Now I'm going to remove some parts of the drawing and I'm going to let you listen to the left parts, so that you can hear all the visible elements. So I'm going to remove, for example
, all the medium and high notes and I'm going to let you hear only the melody of the bass line. Excellent! Then I'm going to remove the whole middle part with the chords to show you only the top part, only the very high melodies. And here I just show you the chords and the central melodies. You can see here some blue notes, or rather purple-ish notes, you don't hear them very much, I agree, but they are still there. Maybe there's a little thing where you can tell I "cheated" a little bit. - Haaa
n he cheated, haaaaaaan!" This is about the high notes that makes the top of the cat's head. If you play the piano you already know: the higher a note is, the shorter its sustain. - "That's right Jackson!" [Inspecteur Le Blanko] So I cheated a bit here. I made the notes long here but they actually last quite a short time. I've made the notes longer even though you can't really hear them in the end, very briefly at least. I could also have done that, cut it out so that I have several times the sa
me note. But I thought it was less interesting, I'll show you. Especially because it was a little bit wrong, a little bit dissonant at this point. But I wanted to keep this note, so it's actually a bit of a cheat. I extended it when you can't hear it anymore. It's the only thing where you can say that I actually kinda "cheated". I'm a bit of a rascal... I'm a little bit of a rascal! But hey, you're not going to be mad at me for that, are you? No you won't, we agree! But actually as there is a lo
t of information, a lot of notes played at the same time, It's not obvious, especially for people who are new to music, to hear everything and to think: "Well, what I hear actually fits to what I see". It's not obvious, I can understand that. - Uh, please, so could we stop saying it's fake in the comments? - "I'm not upset, but I'm a bit tired." [French Meme] So first of all, I'm going to clarify something even though it might seem a bit obvious. If you want to do that, it's better to have a min
imum of knowledge in music theory, or to have a little bit of experience in composing music, to be comfortable with creating melodies, with chords and chord progressions and so on, otherwise... - "In ten years, the entire musical repertoire is polluted!" [Kaamelott] Another thing, You should probably start with fairly simple things, start with not too detailed pictures, not very complex, to get a little bit familiar with this concept. I'm thirsty... terrible! THIRSTY! Let's say you found your fi
rst picture to make your first musical drawing. The first thing I think you need is to determine the style of music you want to make. What color, what atmosphere you want to give to your piece. For that there is no recipe. It's only according to your imagination, your inspiration of the moment, and also obviously depending on what the picture gives off, at least what you feel when you see it. You don't even have to use a piano sound. I did it because it speaks to a lot of people and it's beautif
ul in general, But you can use a synthesizer or any other instrument, it's up to you, there are no requirements. So let's say you've chosen your picture and determined what style of music you want to make in relation to that picture. (SORRY for your ears, the explosion sound was not supposed to be that loud OMG.) The first thing I'm going to show you is a little trick I found, that I "made" by myself, that allows me to scale the picture in my MIDI track, to help me a little bit at the beginning,
and to have some marks to place the first notes on the grid. The idea is very simple, you just need to take a screenshot of your MIDI region, so that it occupies most of your screen, and then you take this screenshot, and with the help of a photo editing software (photoshop, after effects etc.) You take your picture and you put it in transparency over this screenshot. - "Ouuuuuh.... So this is very twisted but really smart!" [Le Dîner de Cons] The best thing, if you have an picture that is rela
tively large, is to use the full range of the piano, so scale your picture so that it covers a large part of the MIDI region. As you can see, I've placed a note above the highest note of the piano, and another note below the lowest note of the piano. These two notes are basically the boundaries, the limits of my drawing. My drawing can't go beyond the top or bottom, otherwise there will be no corresponding note. This technique will also allow you to choose the time lenght of your drawing. This w
ill allow you to choose whether you want your musical drawing to last 3, 4, 5 bars etc., as you like. In fact, this concept is a little bit like drawing on a very small picture on Paint, with the pencil tool, pixel by pixel, an picture that is 88 pixels high (since there are 88 keys on a piano), by 88 or more pixels wide. So here I put 88 in height and 100 in width for example. If I zoom in and take the pencil tool. So that's what it comes down to, in terms of accuracy. You're not going to have
anything very detailed but you can have something globally recognizable. It's similar to this, making a pixel by pixel drawing with a small resolution. - "Waaah what the hell is this?"
Of course we don't save this awful thing. So now that you've chosen your picture, the music style, and you've scaled it so that you have a first reference point to start with, well, let's just start placing the very first notes of the drawing. One thing to know, which will be true for all the musical drawings you
can make, is a constant: A vertical line on the picture will always correspond to a chord on your musical drawing. And a horizontal line will always correspond to a continuous note, or a succession of very close notes. Now the idea is to draw the overall shape of the drawing. Even if it sounds completely off at first you don't care, just put the notes in to try and get a drawing which looks like the picture. When your drawing is 90% done, then start trying to play with the notes, one by one, jus
t to make something that sounds good musically. And you'll see that the picture, by itself, by its shape, will impose you certain melodies, certain chords, which may inspire you, give you ideas like "Oh, I could do this, I could do that, I'm going to do this chord here." You have to grope your way through it, it will come to you when it comes. There are no rules here, it's really just music theory, so just do it the way you like. Once you're more or less 100% done with your drawing, you've got t
he whole shape and you like the overall melody, you can then add more notes, which will have no equivalent in the picture at all, but in fact they will be there only for musical purposes. I'm thinking in particular of this whole part here. All this part that has nothing to do with the original picture we agree. There's obviously the horizontal line from the bass line that reminds us of the table, but underneath I did a little bit of what I wanted to do because the main element was the cat, so it
was ok. There is also another place where I added some "foreign" notes, at least foreign to the picture. Here theoretically in the original picture... Damn... Your mother... (classic french insult) Your grandmaaaaaaa.... (less classic french insult lmao) Here, in the original picture if I show you, there is nothing here we agree. So really it's up to you afterwards to add little notes here and there to add a little bit of life to your music, to make it a cooler and more interesting to listen to
. So let's try to make a musical drawing from a star shape, and see what happens. So I took a star, very basic shape. I'm not going to use the transparent layer technique I show you, this is pretty geometric so I won't need it.
(on screen text: but I would have looked like this... And this is the Vietnamese flag btw) Now, I must admit, a star doesn't really mean anything to me, except for something a little bit festive and a little bit joyful, so we'll start with a major scale. Then in terms of
tempo and musical style, well, I don't know. I'm just going to try to do something that sounds good, without really trying to do anything specific. Here's just to show you a little bit of the base, show you how I work to make one. Maybe this will give you some ideas to make your own. I'm going to try to do it on two bars. This is going to be the middle, this is going to be the beginning of a bar, and then there will be a second measure. So here we go. I'm starting randomly. Let's start here. I'm
going to do the same line again here since it's pretty geometric anyway, I mean totally symmetrical. Don't hesitate to use your "Line" tool also on your software, it will help you to draw straight lines. I've done that, let's listen to it, I think it's going to be ugly af. - "It's so... It's so beautiful!" [Joueur du Grenier - Youtuber] It got me! It sucks! It sucks but it's very funny! Well, I'll slow it down because this is too fast while I guessing a chord progression. 85 bpm ?... 85 sounds
pretty good. Now I'm going to try to get everything in a scale and then build chords according to it, and make it sound musically coherent. See, here, for example, I want that instead. That might work. That's not nice, let's go up there. It's not going to be easy with such lowly sloping lines on the bottom of the shape because it's probably going to involve some chromatic downstrokes and upstrokes, which is not easy to harmonize. Maybe we'll cheat a little bit by making some jumps so that it fit
s more or less with the scale. The goal is not to a perfect drawing, but to recognize the original picture through it. I think I'm going to slow it down again because I can see a chord progression taking shape here but it's going a bit fast. I'll put it here instead. I'm also going to open up the little bottom window here that allows me to play with the sustain, I'm going to activate it and we're going to try to make it change as soon as there's a chord change so that it will sound a bit more re
alistic. Maybe we can try to make those chords there. - "How original..." We'll have to see if we can pull it off, but it might be a good idea. Now we could almost say it's over. Anyway you saw I fumbled around a bit, I tried to change the pitch of each notes one by one, I raise it a semitone, I lower it a semitone... I try to make it musically consistent. Ah, I was thinking something eventually, maybe it can work by putting the chords in off-beat instead. It's a little bit better I think, in te
rms of rhythm, yeah definitely better. Great! I like it a lot, it's not bad at all! So you can see I added some notes inside and some notes to embellish the melody while I was doing the drawing. It might be easier for you to do the main shape of the drawing first, and then embellish, add things. For example I added all the chords while I was doing the drawing because I had the progression in mind, but obviously I didn't do it as quickly or as "easily" the first time I did a musical drawing. Then
also something we can do to make it sounds a little more realistic, Well, that's a detail, it's to play a little bit on the velocity of each note. You can see that I already made the chords a little bit softer, so that it's not brutal. You can see that it really looks like a star. Maybe I can reduce the size of the notes that are not really part of the drawing a little bit, which are small ornaments, to make the main shape stand out. Well, here we are! I think that it's enough for a "demonstrat
ion" as it is. to show you a little bit how I do it and how you can do it. I'm going to show you some final results, I think it's really nice for a little thing that I did there in maybe 20 minutes? 25 minutes! Here is the result! Well! I think we're done here! If this video made you want to try to make your own musical drawings, feel free to tag me on TikTok or Instagram when you post them so I can see them and I'll be really happy to give a listen! Now that the video is more or less over, I am
inviting you to follow me on Instagram, TikTok, Twitch too because I'm going to start doing live this year if everything goes well. All I need is a camera, because right now I'm shooting with my phone, which is not very optimal either, we agree. On the other hand, if you are not subscribed to this Youtube channel, I invite you to do it in a warm and courteous way. And while I'm thinking about it, I'll add something that I've been asked several times on TikTok and Insta, I'm going to put downloa
dable links for you to get the MIDI file, as well as a simplified score (declined in 3 levels of difficulty), if you want to learn it on piano For free. My pleasure. It's a gift! Subscribe! ;) Well this outro is starting to be a little bit long, this video is starting to be long too, and I'm not going to hide it from you, I have other things to do! Ciao!
(in french I literally said : "I have other cats to whip" = "I have other things to do") It was about the joke... the cat... theeeeee.... - Yes
but, we got it you know? Well...
- ... the drawing the cat! - Ok but you can go ahead.
- Voilà... Bye! - Yeah.... Get out of here.
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