I love Fire Fight! I got the demo on a PC Gamer disc when I was a kid and played it forever. And couple of years ago when I built a retro PC, it was one of the first games I loaded up :)
If you’re curious about synths, I’d actually say it’s better to start with an instrument that’s standalone (that is, doesn’t need a MIDI controller). The HiChord is a good choice. I’ve personally had lots of fun with Orchid by Telepathic Instruments. And anything with a keyboard by KORG (including the VERY affordable volca line) is also a great starting point.
Once your first synth starts making sense, you’ll get the itch to buy a second, and it’ll be time to delve into MIDI :)
Totally, and I think the need for MIDI Guide - the fact that MIDI CC/NRPN is pretty much a free-for-all - is also why the spec has such staying power. It's so unopinionated that it imposes essentially zero constraints beyond message size. I love it.
That's an interesting idea. We've had a couple of requests to expand the format to include a mapping function between the CC/NRPN values and the 'display' values, e.g. [0, 127] -> [-10, 10], for cases where the relationship is nonlinear. This wouldn't guarantee normalization of meaning (it wouldn't encode the difference between the SH-101's attack and the Bass Station 2's attack), but it would make it easier to pull everything together in an app.
This is my pet feature :) There are so many cool sequencers and controllers, all with their own idiosyncratic plaintext instrument definition formats. Making little exporters for each of them is fun.
Hey thanks. I love the MIDI standard for exactly this reason too. Blows my mind that you can hook a forty year old synth up to a computer or iPad without drivers.
Thanks! My daughter loved it too. I tried to design the sharing workflow so that kids could send their designs to friends with printers (that's why I stuffed all the state into the query string). I struggled with the name, WordCAD sounds so stodgy to me, but the kids I talked to thought it was cool and serious haha