Peavey DPM V3 Owner's Manual page 87

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An optional MIDI thru jack provides a duplicate of the signal at the MIDI in jack. This E
is handy if you want to route MIDI data appearing at one device to another device as
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well.
:
Example: Suppose the MIDI out from a MIDI keyboard such as the DPM 3 feeds the
DPM V3's MIDI in. Patching the DPM V3's MIDI thru to a second DPM V3 sends the =
DPM 3's MIDI signal "thru" to the second DPM V3. Thus, playing on the DPM 3 will =
trigger both DPM V3s.
The DPM V3 was designed for several applications, including being driven by a se-
quencer as a multi-timbral sound expander module. To understand this application, it's
necessary to look a bit into how sequencing works.
Sequencing, the computerized equivalent of tape recording, is a very common and
popular MIDI application. There aré two main types of sequencers: dedicated hard-
ware units and software-based sequencer programs that run on a computer. At pre-
sent, only the Atari ST series and Yamaha C1 computers have built-in MIDI
connections, but other computers can hook up to a "black box" called a MIDI inter-
face, which converts MIDI data into a format the computer can understand. This allows
the computer to control a group of MIDI instruments,
Sequencing takes advantage of the fact that MIDI data can correlate exactly to a per-
formance on a MIDI instrument. Suppose we feed this performance data to a com-
puter's MIDI in jack, and load the computer with a
program that instructs the computer to remember the order in which data appeared at
the MIDI in jack. The computer acts like a recorder, but instead of recording audio, it
stores digital data that represents the notes you played, and the exact order in which
you played those notes.
If you play a chord, each note in the chord results in a discrete piece of data. These
pieces of data, like all MID! data, are sent serially (i.e., one right after the other). For-
tunately, this happens at a very high rate so that notes played at the same time ap-
pear to occur simultaneously, even if a few milliseconds elapse between the first and
last notes of the chord.
Once stored in memory, connecting the computer's MIDI out to the instrument's MIDI
in recreates the performance. The principle is the same as a player piano, but instead
of having keys triggered by holes in a roll of paper, electronic sounds within the
keyboard are triggered by data contained in the computer's memory. This
underscores the importance of a standardized specification, since any MIDI-compatible
device can accept data from the computer. If the sequencer says "play middle C,"
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