You’re probably familiar with Van Basco Karaoke, which takes your midi file and displays it on a piano screen. It’s great for learning how to play any song, if there’s a midi file available for it on the net. You just load your midi program through Van Basco and voila, the notes are displayed on your screen in a little graphical piano. You can even slow stuff down and transpose to any key of your choice.

(screen shot of van basco karaoke’s virtual piano)

But what I want to talk about is MidiJam, which takes midi visualization to a whole new level! It actually takes the actual instruments that are in the midi file and shows them playing REAL notes.

So the piano plays the actual piano notes that are being heard in the midi file. If there is a bass present, you’ll see the bass plucking real notes too. Same with drums, horns, strings… ANYTHING!

Download the program and mess around with it. It’s a little old school and not as user-friendly as I’d like but it’s decent. Read the “readme.txt” file. I had a hard time figuring out how to bring a midi file of my choice into the program (…you just actually drag the midi file to the midijam.exe icon but the “readme.txt” file covers all that).

It’s cool! I was impressed.

Oops, one last thing. You can then go to Freemidi.org and download as many free midi files as you want (there’s other directories out there too, just google “midi directory”). Then you can open them in MidiJam and enjoy the midi visualization “on steroids.”

Meanwhile, check out some of these clips of midijam in action that people have posted on youtube.

(since these youtube clips were screen captured, the audio sync isn’t perfect but once you download midijam and run it from your own computer, it syncs perfectly)…

And Chris Pirillo, the guy who introduced me to MidiJam:

Download: MidiJam