Making Your Own MIDI Dumps

[LeviR.star]

Let's face it, folks; making your own sheets is hard! You gotta find the original source, open the engraving software of your choice, transcribe the music from the source note by note... it's far too tedious, not to mention time-consuming. Who even has time for that? Nobody, that's who. But never fear, because there's a secret technique lost to time, one practiced in the ancient days of NinSheetMusic; what is it, you ask? I'll tell you: it's called...

MIDI DUMPING

Why waste your time creating an arrangement from scratch when there's an entire internet full of readily available MIDIs to claim as your own? Once you've mastered MIDI dumping, you can produce your own sheet music in minutes, without having to deal with that pesky transcription process everybody hates. So follow me, fellow NSMer! Because I'm about to teach you the fabulous art of...

MIDI DUMPING

... *ahem* Let's begin!


MIDI Dumping - Step by Step Tutorial

1. Finding MIDIs | A great MIDI dump begins with a great MIDI. But where to find one?

There's lots of places to find them, really. Personally, I like to consult good ol' VGMusic.com, but Kingdom Hearts Insider is a pretty nice resource as well. "What should I do if I can't find the MIDI I want to make into my own arrangement?" No worries! Check out this handy Online Audio to MIDI Converter tool—I think all MIDIs ought to be made this way, but that's just me. If you're pirati- I mean, borrowing a song from YouTube, go ahead and use YTMP3 to convert the video into a downloadable MP3 file.

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See? Easy as pie! Now, onto the next step:

2. Importing MIDIs | Now that you've got the MIDI you want to turn into a sheet, it's time to import it into your engraving software. Finale is preferable, but if you use other software, like MuseScore, that's okay, it just makes you objectively inferior. As long as you can import MIDIs, you can make a dump.

Now, you'd think bringing them into Finale (which you should be using,) starts with clicking on the "Import" option, but this isn't the case! Instead, you're gonna want to bring up your File Explorer menu on Windows (which you should be using,) and simply click "Open" on the MIDI you intend to dump. Next, it'll bring up another menu with options; apparently, the staff here at NinSheetMusic don't allow solo piano arrangements with three or more staves because it's "physically impossible to play", so make sure the resulting file you produce has only two. You'll know it's working when it brings up a "MIDI File Status" window, so just sit back and let the computer work its magic.

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You're almost there, my friend! There's one last step in the process...

3. Making MIDIs into Sheets | As you can see, your MIDI has now turned itself into readable notes on the page. Hobbyists on the Internet always produce faithful transcriptions for their MIDIs, and the converters are plenty reliable, so there's no need to check to see how your sheet sounds; that's the updaters' job, after all. We're not done yet, though, because we need to fill out some information to make our sheet complete. At the top of the first page, enter the title, composer, and arranger (that's you. You did all the importing, right?) At the bottom of the same page, enter the publisher and release year for the copyright info. If you don't know this stuff off the top of your head, just guess. Nobody really cares about being credited, y'know.

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Will you look at that! With just one easy tutorial, you've already mastered MIDI dumping, which means you're ready to share your sheet music with the world! Making arrangements used to be boring and far too difficult, but now anyone can do it, even you, ya dingus! So what are you waiting for? Go check out our submissions guide and get those up on the site already! All your hard work has finally paid off.