Welcome MUSC 116 students. This is your tutorial on changing volume of MIDI instruments in Aria Maestosa. This comes in very handy. If you can adjust the volume properly for your MIDI files here, then you don’t have to try to work with it in Reaper. If you are recording into Reaper with your MIDI file then, of course, then you can’t adjust the volume (of individual instruments) because all of the instruments will be there in one file together.

Now Aria Maestosa assigns a MIDI volume number to each note. If I right click on the note—for instance my snare—it is 80. If I right click on the ride cymbal note, there is an 80. Let me pick here this Jazz Guitar note, you will see that it is an 80. If I do the flute as well, it will be an 80. So that is the default number.

But just because the default numbers are all the same, if doesn’t mean that the instruments sound equally as loud. Let’s listen here.

[music]

Could you hear that ride cymbal at all? It is difficult because this instrument is so much quieter than the other instruments. The flute was very loud; probably next loudest was the jazz guitar; and then you could hear a little bit of the snare.

Let me mute these two tracks. I mute it by putting the red dot there. Let’s for a moment just hear the percussion track.

[percussion track]

Can you hear how quiet that ride cymbal is? Well, one way to solve this problem is to right click on the note and put the volume at maximum. Here it is 127. I have it at 127 there. I keep adding these extra instruments here! I have it at 127 here, and I think also have it slid up to 127 there as well. OK, so let’s listen to that now and see if it is any better.

[percussion track]

Yes, that is a little louder. This particular instrument—there may not be much of a solution. Maybe I need to pick a second percussion instrument that is actually louder.

The other way you can do something with this is… Let me choose the flute track here. Now we go up to tracks—properties, and then we need to choose the instrument. Well, here you can see the only instrument box I can check is guitar. Something is messed up on the programming. It says here track for flute properties and the box I will check here is jazz guitar. This is actually working on the flute properties. I can set the volume for new notes. This is not existing notes but new notes. Let me set the volume down. Let’s say that I already knew that the flute was going to be too loud. So I am going to set it down to 31. Let me put in some new notes here. Let’s see if you can hear a difference. Here is a C. A# here. Let’s do a G.

Alright so let’s hear what the difference is now. OK, let’s play this from the beginning

[music]

Could you hear how much quieter the flute was? I still have an old flute thing (note) down there.

You can see that there is even a slightly difference shading of color. These are lighter showing that they are not quite as loud.

So that is two ways that you can change the volume and try to even out the instruments. You can do it individually by right clicking on the instrument (note) or if you know ahead of time—maybe tested it—that some instruments are louder than others you can go to properties and set the new default for that instrument. Thank you.