Guest Composer Stef Haynes Exploring MIDI as a Creative Tool

Hi, I'm Steph Haynes. I'm a performer and producer and composer, working primarily in the genre of modern jazz fusion. Music technology is a huge part of my work as a performer and a composer.

When I first started composing with MIDI, I didn't completely understand what it is or how it works. I was doing a lot of my composition in either Sibelius or in Logic Pro, and eventually I discovered that I could export my work from Sibelius as MIDI and open it in Logic. This was awesome for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it was great to hear my work played back on Logic's incredible virtual instruments, but more importantly, I began to explore Logic's MIDI transform functions. Instead of experimenting in Sibelius, I started doing it in Logic because Logic has a different set of MIDI transform functions that are a little bit less geared toward creating sheet music and a little bit more geared toward creative music experimentation.

Using these functions, I could hear my music transformed in a variety of different ways, such as in reverse or completely flipped upside down. These transformations gave me a different perspective on my music that inspired me to take my music in directions that I hadn't considered before. I also began experimenting with Logic's MIDI effects, such as the arpeggiator, the note repeater, the transposer, and the chord trigger. So I'm a saxophone player first and foremost, so a lot of my compositions are melody first, and sometimes it can be difficult to come up with harmony for these melodies, and a way that I like to do that is I like to use a MIDI device such as a chord trigger or a note repeater that transposes notes in a certain way and helps me come up with harmonies that way. These MIDI effects and MIDI transform functions exist in other DAWs as well, but Logic was the one that I had, so that's the one that I used.

I find MIDI to be really useful because I can take the same pitch and rhythmic material and run it through different sound libraries or synthesizers and see what works best in my composition. I was working on a project where I recorded a performer playing a keyboard part in MIDI, and then I was able to, in post, change the sound of that instrument to something different. The other thing that I was able to do that worked really well in this composition was I was able to take the pitch information and snap it to a whole new tonality and also run that through an arpeggiator, so that the chords were now a moving line that sounded really interesting in the music. These kinds of manipulations are only possible through the use of MIDI.

Use of these MIDI devices has since become a significant part of my composition process because of the way that they can transform my musical ideas into something wholly new, yet still original and true to my artistic vision.