Setting up MIDI on a Mac

- To set up Pro Tools to work with your MIDI devices, the first step is to plug in all of your devices. Make any physical connections you need on any MIDI controllers, MIDI interfaces, or sound modules you want to use in your setup. Once you've made all the proper MIDI connections, then start up your computer and launch Pro Tools. From the Setup menu, let's go to the MIDI submenu, and we'll open MIDI Studio. This will launch the Audio MIDI Setup application, or AMS. Audio MIDI Setup will automatically scan your computer system, and recognize any properly connected MIDI interfaces.

Each interface, with each of its MIDI ports numbered, will show up here. If for some reason you don't see your device in this window, just click the Add Device button for each missing MIDI device that's connected to your interface. This will create a new icon for a new external device. I'm gonna go ahead and add this as a Korg Triton. We can double-click to change the device name, and you can select from the manufacturers list. There we go. Once we set the manufacturer and model, we can click Apply, unless you want to make any other changes.

We can also change the icon here. We can choose from the generic presets, or can place our own custom TIFF files by putting them in the Library > Audio > MIDI Devices > Generic > Images Folder. Then you can choose that custom image. Click Apply when you're ready to save it. We can close the window. And now to connect the MIDI device to the MIDI interface, we just need to click the output port, or the arrow, and drag the virtual cable. We can drag it to the input port to which we want to connect it.

Make sure that these connections mirror your actual, physical connections. Note that these cables will connect only if you're actually using MIDI cables to connect your gear. If your MIDI controller is connected to the computer via USB, you won't need to do this. If you want to delete one of these connections, just click on the cable, and press the Delete key. I don't actually want to delete this connection though, so let's add it again. Now let's switch back to Pro Tools. On the MIDI 1 track let's select the MIDI output, and set this to Korg Triton, channel-1.

What this means is that the output of this MIDI track is now routed to the Korg Triton. The Triton is being used as our sound source, rather than using a virtual instrument in Pro Tools. To choose the specific sounds from the Triton, we can just click the Patch List button here. All the Korg Triton patch names are preloaded in Pro Tools because the audio MIDI setup knows that it's connected and it makes the patches available to Pro Tools. If we wanted to change to a different patch name file, instead of the Korg Triton, we can just hit Change, and it will take us right to a directory where we can choose from any of these manufacturers and devices.

If you have several MIDI controllers or devices, you can just repeat this process for each MIDI device that is connected to your system. With you MIDI gear properly connected and routed through the audio MIDI setup, getting your MIDI data into Pro Tools is really simple.