Dee when you're recording MIDI into PT all the computer is doing is recording what notes you play on the keyboard and any "performance gestures" such as pressing the sustain pedal, moving the modulation joystick or applying aftertouch. No audio is recorded, so your effects on the Triton don't come into the equation.
Effectively it's like having someone watching over your shoulder as you play and writing down what notes you play and when, and then playing those notes back for you when you hit Play. If you could look inside a MIDI cable and watch the messages flying down it when you play a C Major chord you'd see something like this :
C3 Note On with velocity of 45
E3 Note On with velocity of 45
G3 Note On with velocity of 45
... and then when you released the three keys you'd see 3 corresponding messages :
C3 Note Off
E3 Note Off
G3 Note Off
Similarly if you depress the sustain pedal a message flies down the MIDI cable saying :
Controller 64 was set to 127
... and then when you release it :
Controller 64 was set to 0.
It's not dissimilar to operating your TV remote control. When you type in a channel number and hit Enter a message is sent from the remote control to the television telling it you to change the channel. MIDI is essentially just a form of remote control telling an instrument to play a note or stop playing it.
Another important concept is the idea of a MIDI Channel. All of these note on and note off commands need to correctly address the right sound on the Triton or any other synth that is capable of playing 16 different sounds at the same time. That is achieved using a Channel number from 1 thru 16, to address the appropriate timbre or track. So a complete MIDI message or command looks like this :
Tell the guy on Channel 1 to start playing the note C3 with a velocity of 45.
So when you record yourself playing the keyboard into a MIDI sequencer you're just recording a bunch of commands saying play this note or stop playing that note and the software records each command and the musical time at which the command was received. Then when hit play, the software spits those commands back out at the appropriate musical time.
That's exactly how your Triton works and ProTools too.
Recording MIDI onto multiple tracks is effectively just giving your virtual orchestra score to play, but nothing has been recorded to tape yet. The next step is to record the audio coming out of the Triton when the MIDI is playing it into audio tracks in ProTools. Typically I do this by muting all the MIDI tracks except the one whose audio I want to record, and then hitting the record button. That makes the sequencer play the MIDI and record the audio. Having done that I mute that MIDI track, because the corresponding audio is going to play from the audio track I just captured instead. Rinse and repeat for each MIDI track. Note that the key thing here is that the sequencer can play MIDI and record audio at the same time. Cunning ! So it's just recording the audio generated by the MIDI it played back. Be sure to have the right effects on each sound on the Triton before you do that. Don't over do it, because it's the next step where the real audio processing happens. Personally I don't use too many effects on the keyboard itself, maybe just things like chorus, and rely on the DAW for stuff like EQ and reverb and apply those when mixing (see below).
After doing that you will have a bunch of muted MIDI tracks and corresponding audio tracks for each sound/part. Now the fun part begins because you now have a bunch of audio tracks to mix and apply effects to. Note that we recorded each instrument to a separate audio track so we can apply effects such as EQ to each one individually to make them all fit together. You can also setup Master or Send effects and use those to apply the same reverb effect to all the all the tracks in the mix.
Having mixed your 16 tracks and got all the effects right, you can then "bounce" the whole lot down to a stereo audio file, ready to burn to a CD or convert to an MP3. Normally you'd apply some kind of mastering effect(s) to that stereo mix before distributing it, but I'll save that topic for another occassions.
So again ... the workflow :
1) Score your virtual orchestra by recording each part into a MIDI track associated with one of the 16 sounds/channels on the Triton. Tinker with the MIDI for each until correct.
2) Record the virtual orchestra playing the score to tape ... i.e. record what's played by each invididual MIDI track to it's own audio track.
3) Having recorded the music played by each MIDI track to a corresponding audio track, mix and apply effects to each audio track until you have all them sitting nicely with each other.
4) Bounce the multiple audio tracks down to a single stereo file.
That's how I work anyway
If your timing and playing is really good, then you can just record the audio the Triton generates when you play, straight to an audio track and bypass the MIDI part. That's what you have to do with singers, guitars, pianos and other things that don't have MIDI sockets. It's much more direct, but you don't get as much opportunity as you do with MIDI to fine tune "the score".
Daz.
.......what's going on?
