If you need a little help with your sums, the selection of calculators on the MC Squared site might be just the place to find it.
The Internet was originally conceived as a resource for sharing information — and there's still quite a lot of it out there among the Star Trek sites and pirated MP3s, if you know where to look. Sam Inglis unearths some facts.
The Internet is sometimes described as 'the largest library in the world'. It's certainly bigger than the municipal library in my home town — but then, it's also open for more than four hours a week, contains no smelly people reading Railway Modeller, and is not ruled with a rod of iron by a middle‑aged woman called Sandra, so perhaps the analogy is not as accurate as all that. What is true, though, is that scattered among the virtual Mills & Boons and parish magazines is a fair amount of useful information. Just as real libraries have a reference section where you can look up almost any fact (provided it was known in 1979, when the shelves were last stocked), so the Net offers a number of invaluable reference sites. Should you ever find yourself desperately needing to know the difference between class A and class AB circuits, or which note in the GM drum map will give you a low timbale, you could do much worse than fire up your Web browser and head out into the cybershelves — at least no‑one will say 'Shhh' if you make a noise...
MIDI Reference Sites
If you're thinking of buying a computer recording system, the database of soundcards and interfaces on the Mission A/V site could be invaluable.
As every electronic musician will know, MIDI is all about numbers — note numbers, controller numbers, non‑registered parameter numbers, and so on. And though there are few things more boring than big lists of numbers, sometimes they can be exactly what you need, especially when you're forced to dabble with SysEx.
The most obvious source of information and reference material on MIDI is, unsurprisingly, www.midi.org, which includes the official home page of the MIDI Manufacturers' Organisation. Their resources page includes summaries of the basic MIDI message format, the General MIDI specification and the GM instrument patch map and GM drum map. You can find a complete list of manufacturer IDs, not to mention Downloadable Sound Proprietary Chunk IDs (!). If you find this too light and frothy and want some serious bedtime reading, there are also details on how you can order a print copy of the full MIDI specification (every copy comes with a free anorak, notebook and thermos...).
Other handy MIDI information sites include the MIDI Studio Consortium, http://midkar.com/MidiStudio/. Their help pages contain more information and tables on General MIDI. For a detailed explanation of the structure of a Standard MIDI File, visit Mark Clay's home page at ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/mark_clay/midi.htm. Another good site is the Center for Electronic and Computer Music at Indiana University, https://cecm.indiana.edu. Among much handy MIDI information can be found a table of standard MIDI Controller numbers and a table listing MIDI note numbers, the equal‑temperament semitone values to which they correspond, and the frequency of the resulting pitch.
The MIDI Farm site (www.midifarm.com) has been mentioned in Net Notes before, and not without reason — it's a valuable resource for the hi‑tech musician. Check out the 'Library & Info' section for detailed lists of MIDI messages and Controller numbers, the specification of the MIDI Sample Dump standard, and more. Another site worth visiting is that of UK MIDI gadget manufacturer Philip Rees; at www.philrees.co.uk/articles/ they offer details of how to wire DIN plugs for MIDI and why MIDI Thru boxes are necessary, as well as two longer articles — a detailed explanation of SMPTE timecode, and an explanation of MIDI channels, voices, timbres and modes which clarifies a lot of the more obscure issues surrounding polyphony and multitimbrality.
Online Glossaries
With so much jargon flying around the world of hi‑tech music and recording, even the most experienced can suddenly find themselves confronted by a word or phrase that means absolutely nothing to them. Things can be even worse if you're relatively new to the field: it can feel as though you need a Rosetta Stone just to understand the legending on the front of your synth. Fortunately, there are a number of web sites which will help to guide you through the terminological maze — and where better to start than Sound On Sound's own web site? At www.soundonsound.com/glossary you'll find a comprehensive list of terms used in recording, with clear and accurate explanations.
You can find a short glossary of terms relating to the black art of acoustics on the net plus a number of online glossaries explaining the terms used in music notation. A good one is www.hnh.com/mgloss.htm, a site which also includes a comprehensive (though sadly not searchable) list of classical composers with biographies and major works.
Audio Recording References
When it comes to reference and information resources on audio and hi‑tech recording, the net yields up an even better selection. It seems unfair to describe the marvellous Rane Audo Reference page as merely a glossary — a 'mine of information' would be more appropriate. If you ever wondered exactly what the difference between dBV, dBu and dBFS is, or who invented the vocoder, or what it means to say that a measurement is A‑weighted, here's your answer... I bet you didn't know what a hamster switch is, either. Be warned, though, that there are some rather deadpan joke definitions lurking among the useful explanations ('write‑only memory', anyone?).
The MC Squared site (www.mcsquared.com/index.htm) has a lot of useful information about loudspeaker specifications, which could be particularly useful if you're buying a speaker system and need to make sense of manufacturers' spec sheets. They also offer a unique series of Javascript calculators (see above) for working out reverb times, relative loudnesses at different distances in different spaces, and so forth — just feed in the measurements of your room and/or system, and away you go!
The Indiana University site I mentioned earlier at www.indiana.edu/~emusic/ has a host of handy information pages and tutorials, including a guide to the different types of microphone, connector and cable, a part‑by‑part guide to mixer input anatomy, and more. There's even more useful material at the University of California Santa Cruz site, https://arts.ucsc.edu. This site includes comprehensive introductions to the physics of sound and the principles of recording, along with a guide to different types of studio equipment (although many of the links seemed to be down when I visited).
Another invaluable audio and recording resource is the Reading Room on the Mission A/V site. As well as a host of interesting articles on MIDI, digital and analogue recording, covering such diverse topics as tape baking, erasing DAT tapes, digital jitter, piano tuning and more, they maintain a searchable database of computer audio interfaces. This holds detailed specifications and comments, under more than 40 categories, for a wide range of PC and Mac soundcards and interfaces. The database lists not only the cards' connectivity and I/O, but their host requirements (such as how many IRQs they use in a PC system), known incompatibilities with other hardware, and which sorts of drivers are supported. If you're thinking of buying a soundcard and want to check out its spec in detail, or discover some possible alternatives, it's a great place to look.
A slightly more unusual reference resource is the complete searchable database of IEC graphical symbols. These are categorised by, among other things, their Application: enter 'Audio' for a complete list of IEC symbols pertaining to audio appliances. Alternatively, you can search by keyword or shape of symbol.
Final Thoughts
Another thing the Internet has in common with real libraries is that no matter what you need to look up, you will inevitably be sidetracked into looking at something completely irrelevant that you find completely by accident.
Chord Blimey
The University of Virginia site I noted for its MIDI resources offers another impressive feature — a searchable dictionary of guitar chords, containing 4,398 chords! You can specify not only the chord you want to know (including all the weird and wonderful variations beloved of jazz guitarists with goatees), but the root note and neck position too. Clicking on the resulting fretboard diagram then allows you to hear a MIDI file of that chord, if your browser supports this facility. What's more, you can also search the other way around — if you hit upon a pleasing arrangement of your fingers on the fretboard, but you're not sure what chord(s) this corresponds to, you can do a Visual Search. Instead of entering the name of the chord and getting a list of diagrams that represent that chord, you click on a virtual fretboard to show where your fingers are going, and get back the name(s) of that chord!
Ways And Mains
Planning to set up a studio in Equatorial New Guinea, and worried about whether your existing studio gear will run on the mains? Organising a field‑recording stint in Aruba, and want to know what sort of adaptor to take? The Equitech site almost certainly has the answer, including as it does a complete table of mains power voltages and frequencies for every country in the world (www.equitech.com). There's also a wad of useful technical information about balanced power systems, if you're that way inclined.