Well, since I couldn’t think of a better idea for today’s article, I thought that I’d get nostalgic about MIDI covers of songs. If you grew up around computers in the late 1990s or early-mid 2000s, you might remember these.
If you had slow dial-up internet, if you didn’t have an iTunes account, if you didn’t have the money to buy lots of CDs and/or you didn’t have a friend who had a cousin who knew someone who used Napster, then there was a good chance that you probably stumbled across MIDI covers at some point during your youth. They were the “We have music at home” version of digital music.
The MIDI format is a really old file format from the very early 1990s and, as this Wikipedia article explains, a “.mid” file isn’t technically an audio recording. It’s a series of instructions that tell a synthesiser what to play. Think “sheet music for computers” or one of those ancient “player pianos” which used rolls of punched paper. Computers can read these files and re-create the music digitally. The downside is that it only allows for instrumental music – without vocals – and it often sounds like the background music in an old 1990s videogame with pixel art graphics.
But the file sizes can be absolutely tiny – “Entire three to five minute songs that take up less than 100kb” tiny. Tiny enough that they can easily be downloaded on even the slowest of dial-up internet. Tiny enough that you can fit 10-15 of them on an old-fashioned 1.44mb floppy disk.
And, back in the late 1990s and early-mid 2000s, amateur musicians would record covers of popular metal, punk, rock etc… songs on a keyboard and post the MIDI files online, often on old-school HTML and/or GeoCities/Angelfire/Tripod websites. Seriously, you’d actually get whole websites with tables of MIDI links, gnarly animated GIFs and stuff like that back then.
People who make MIDI covers these days will often just post recordings of them on sites like Youtube instead of offering the basic files for download. And, for the true 1990s/early 2000s experience, you have got to start by listening to a MIDI cover of Nirvana’s 1991 song “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
To get around the lack of vocals, some musicians would add an extra riff – often with a slightly higher-pitched artificial “instrument” (I don’t know the terminology) – that was in time with the vocals. Often, though, you’d just get an instrumental version of a popular metal, punk, rock etc… song.
It was absolutely low-budget as hell, a heavily downgraded version of the song. But, if you couldn’t get hold of a recording of the actual song, then it was better than nothing. It was like a memento or a memory aid, something which gave you the basic melody of the song but also wasn’t a proper version of it. Better than just having the song stuck in your head with no way to listen to it.
Still, if you grew up at a certain time, there’s just something weirdly nostalgic about listening to MIDI covers of songs. It’s a relic from a time when modern “streaming” didn’t exist, when “social media” consisted of old-school forums, when dial-up internet was still a thing, when you’d know about a cool band but either not be able to find their CDs in the shops or not have enough pocket money to justify buying an entire CD for just one song and then find yourself typing something like “[Band name] MIDI” into AltaVista and stumbling across some garish amateur website filled with low-quality MIDI files.
If you’re a certain age and you grew up around computers, then MIDI covers are a surprisingly nostalgic thing….
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
