Graphical MIDI Monitor released

When working with MIDI and programming synth sounds, you now and then need to know what's going on between your MIDI generating controller, like your keyboard, guitar synth, EWI, or pedal controllers, and your (soft) synths. If you need to monitor your MIDI signals there are a number of good applications, however, most of them show raw MIDI message data and numbers rather than easy to read parameters. Besides this, most other monitor applications only monitor MIDI data but do not generate any MIDI data.

So I decided to develop a Graphical MIDI Monitor using Max of Cycling74. The name indeed implies that all MIDI data you put into it is shown in a graphical manner which makes analysis a lot easier. Besides this, the Graphical MIDI Monitor can also generate MIDI messages by simply dragging sliders, dragging numbers and clicking keys. Read more...

I now use it myself to help programming synth sounds. By dragging the velocity slider, I can for example generate notes with a particular velocity to hear how the synth sound reacts. Also I can drag the breath control slider up and down to simulate breath control input.

For EWI players it can also be useful to use the Graphical MIDI monitor to calibrate the sensor sensitivity on the EWI. In particular for calibrating breath sensitivity (MIDI controller #2), glide sensitivity (MIDI controller #5), pitch bend and vibrato. By blowing and playing the EWI and adjusting the sensitivity on the EWI you can immediately see the effect on the MIDI output.

Click on the picture to see all user interface details. Graphical MIDI Monitor is a stand-alone application and runs on Mac. Go to the download section and download it free of charge to try it out!