MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is one of the greatest tools for contemporary music producers. It allows the user to control, synchronise and record the performance of any electronic instrument. This ranges from synthesisers, drum machines and electronic drum kits, to sound modules and computers. MIDI has been around since 1983 and with the advent of samplers, virtual instruments, and plugins, its functionalities and usage has become ubiquitous in every songwriting and production process.
Thanks to MIDI you can write a full orchestra arrangement, play drums or get classic synth tones with nothing more than a MIDI keyboard and your computer. The MIDI data gets stored in the DAW session, and it plays back over and over with no degradation, letting the artist add, modify, rewrite or even layer different sounds with the same information. But what happens when it comes down to mixing? Should we keep MIDI programs or should they be rendered to audio? Is there any difference? Let’s see what’s going on behind the scenes.
MIDI and Instruments Tracks
Every time we create a virtual instrument, or MIDI track, in our DAW session, the software stores all the MIDI information and presents it as clips or items in our timeline. This data could be sent to MIDI outputs to play on external devices and then record their output sound. That’s how it was done back in the day, and in some scenarios this technique is still used.
Nowadays it’s more common to see MIDI clips in your sessions, and then a virtual instrumentplugin inserted into your track playing back the information stored in the clips as the playhead progresses. Under the hood, what the DAW is doing is bundling together a MIDI track containing the MIDI data, and an Aux track with the virtual instrument used as an insert, building what is known as an instrument track.
Virtual Instruments Vs Audio
There are a vast amount of virtual instruments out there, and they can be grouped into two main categories: Sample-based and Synth-based.
Digital audio files on the other hand are a series of binary code that represents a waveform. Every time we press play, the computer reads the audio information from our drive and sends it to our Digital-to-Analog converter to turn it into sound.
As you can probably imagine, managing audio files is always easier for the computer, compared with virtual instruments. The more instruments we add to the session the more burden we put on the computer’s processing, whilst if we add the same amount of audio files, the processing is drastically reduced since the computer only has to read files in sync. That is why it is always recommended to render, commit or freeze your MIDI instrument, whenever you are done writing and you are ready for mixing. You will save processing power to invest later in your mixing plugins or effects.
But do they sound different? Short answer —no. If everything is done correctly, your rendered audio and your virtual instrument track should be exactly the same. To test this, just flip the polarity of the audio track and play both tracks simultaneously. If you can’t hear anything then both outputs are exactly the same. Having said that, some software instrument’s output are slightly different to their rendered version and when you do the test some sound still plays. This might be due to internal software routing or small bugs.
But rendering your MIDI tracks will not only save processing power, it will also allow you to share your projects with collaborators that don’t necessarily have the same plugins. Most importantly, it will future proof your sessions for whenever you change computers or the plugins get outdated.
Do you render your MIDI tracks before mixing? What is your workflow when mixing virtual instruments in your productions? Let us know in the comments below and subscribe to our newsletter to get more tips and tricks about production.
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