SPRINGFIELD JOURNAL-REGISTER (SPRINGFIELD, IL)
MIDI SEQUENCERS HELP MAKE THE MUSIC HAPPEN

July 29, 2004
by Nick Rogers

When Andre 3000's voice on the chorus to "Roses" must be replaced with beeps and blips to work as a ringtone, all the work is done on a MIDI sequencer.

"People really like that clunky quirkiness," says Chris Dunn, director of production for Modtones, a California-based ringtone provider. "It's kind of cute. There's no mistaking MIDI for the actual recording unless it's techno or sequenced pop." MIDI, which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is used on electronic musical keyboards and PCs for computer control of musical instruments and devices.

Instead of an actual music file, the MIDI sounds that play out on cellular handsets are bits of code, interpreted and then played by the synthesizers within the phone.

"It's so good for the medium because it's so small, file-size wise," says Dunn, who played MIDI sequencers in live shows and studio recordings before going to work for Modtones in 2001.

After Modtones acquires rights to reproduce a song, the process of converting it to a MIDI ringtone takes about two hours. Dunn and his production team go through each source tune they receive, picking the best clip of the song, or "the most hooky," as he says.

By ear, the drum, bass, guitars, keyboards and melody line will be programmed into a MIDI sequencer.

Because Modtones is available on many different handsets, each with different synthesizers and speakers, the final step is to mix each MIDI file to specifically match each phone.

"These aren't the sort of $5,000 synthesizers you'd buy at a music store," Dunn says. "One handset will be really bassy, and then on the next, you won't even be able to hear the bass at all. It's trying to make it as accurate as possible, and kind of like giving a little love to the files."

Dunn says as Modtones becomes available on more handsets, creating more remixes to be made, the time it takes to create each ringtone may increase.

Hip-hop tunes are the easiest to re-create, he says, the reason being that much of hip-hop is based on sampled snippets from other songs.

"It's not being MIDI per se, but it's the same idea," he says.

Though he can't name a specific song, Dunn says it has been a challenge to mirror the sounds of some new female pop singers.

"Sometimes it sounds like about 800 female singers just running scales, and suddenly it's not words," he says. "You have to have this saxophone noise redoing this mishmash of scales going back and forth. But over time, we've figured out how to make that translate."