electronics

Did you ever wish to play an instrument and interact at the same time with another instrument? As an example: Your audience is listening to your great guitar playing. But you want to give them more than that: With one touch on a piece of fine cutted aluminium foil you can trigger a MIDI control command and add whatever you like to your musical performance: Loops, drums, keyboards...

In this second installment of our Arduino tutorial series, we will learn to use the Arduino micro-controller as a tool to control electronics by reading MIDI, in this case turning on the Arduino's built in LED when it receives MIDI note on messages. If you haven't already read our first Arduino tutorial on MIDI out, we suggest you at least give it a quick glance.

Note! We have received some concern about connecting "directly" from the Arduino to the MIDI in port of a HW synth. Although we have done this successfully with several different HW setups, note that LMP does not take any responsibility for any catastrophic results of this tutorial. In the next part of this tutorial, "Arduino and MIDI in", we will introduce the optocoupler.