downloading casio lk-240 song bank to pc as midi files

[mina.ed.2010]

hi

i have a key-lighted keyboard casio lk-240, which helped me very much learning piano, all i had to do was only playing built- in songs and memorizing as much as i can, especially advanced classical songs.
so now i am aiming to learn reading notes and i guess the best way is to convert songs i learned to midi files and playing them on a midi player like synthesia to watch sheet music synched with what i can play.
so, now how to convert it ?
the problem is it isn't available on casio website, so i guess the only way is to write the casio's sheet music book included in, with a midi editing software, or pdf to midi scanning software, i just discovered now, like here
wwwsynthesiagamecom wiki Converting_Sheet_Music
but i don't think it is perfect, it certainly would need editing, so any suggestions?
i wonder, is midi editors are as easy as notepad or word?
what way should i go?
thanks

 

[SeaGtGruff]

There are free programs that let you enter musical notation on a clef, such as Crescendo, which can then export the finished piece to a MIDI file, which you could then load into a MIDI editor or DAW for further editing if needed. Search for "free music notation software."

Most (or all?) DAWs let you enter music using a piano roll editor, which is quite different than entering notes on a clef-- although entering notes on a piano roll keyboard is easy; it's positioning the notes on specific beats and making them last the desired length of time that can be a bit trickier-- and you can also play a song on your keyboard and send the notes to a DAW as MIDI data rather than entering them manually in the piano roll editor. Also, many DAWs do have a music notation editor view.

MIDI editors aren't like text editors per se, because MIDI events consist of numerical data, and the number of bytes varies depending on the type of MIDI event. MIDI note events can be entered via music notation, piano roll editors, or playing on an actual keyboard, but there are a lot of additional types of MIDI events, such as Bank Select and Program Change events to select the specific instrument sound (known variously as "patches," "presets," "voices," "tones," etc., depending on the keyboard manufacturer), or Pitch Bend events, or various other Control Change events to modify the Attack Time, Release Time, Filter Cutoff Frequency, Filter Resonance, Reverb Depth, Chorus Depth, etc. Many DAWs let you insert MIDI events using a graphical interface-- like plotting values on a bar graph, or drawing curves-- whereas other DAWs stick to a more numeric format where you type in the series of values (bytes) that are needed for the particular MIDI event.

Probably the trickiest part of MIDI editing is when you want to enter a command that's specific to a particular manufacturer, or even to a specific keyboard model. There are a lot of standard MIDI events/commands, but every manufacturer can come up with their own set of additional commands which are specific to their keyboards-- these are known as "System Exclusive" (or "SysEx" for short) events. You might be able to find an editor or utility that can read and write SysEx events for a particular manufacturer's keyboards, such as those used by Yamaha, Casio, Roland, Korg, etc.-- but if you're using a DAW that doesn't recognize a manufacturer's SysEx events then you'll generally need to enter them as a string of numbers (possibly in hexadecimal format). In that case you'll want to have a list of SysEx events for your keyboard and keep it handy-- typically you'll find them listed in one of the documents for your keyboard, typically in the keyboard's "MIDI guide," or possibly in the back of the keyboard's "owner's manual." In some cases the document may list only a few of the available SysEx commands, in which case you might be able to find documents that list all of the available SysEx events.

But for the most part you can probably get by with the standard MIDI commands, since the bulk of what you want to do involves simply entering the notes to be played and selecting which "programs" ("patches") to use.