Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight is an electronic-based hip-hop album that took advantage of MIDI technology to create a unique sound. Throughout the album, MIDI’s influence is clear in the melodies, harmonies, and drum tracks.
On tracks like “goosebumps”, a hi-hat is played perfectly on every eighth note. If one goes back and listens to older hip-hop, this pattern is quite common, but before MIDI it was very difficult to get those hi-hats as perfectly placed as they are in tracks like this. The invention of MIDI allowed the producers of this song, Cardo, CuBeatz, and YeX, to create these perfect eighth notes. This was done in one of two ways: they either recorded the drum pattern on a MIDI controller and went back after recording into their DAW to perfect it, or they simply typed the notes into the DAW without the use of a MIDI hardware controller at all. Either way, creating a hi-hat pattern like this would’ve been impossible before MIDI was invented. No drummer, no matter how good, can play hi-hats this perfectly for the length of an entire song.
Other tracks, like “wonderful”, which is produced both by Mike Dean and Travis Scott himself, the influence of MIDI is clear from 2:38-2:50, when most of the production drops away except for a few drums and a bell sound. The same methods of creating drum patterns that were mentioned above are still present here, although in the form of a kick drum and clap sound, but there’s now another layer: the bells. It’s a very non-traditional, distorted bell sound that wouldn’t ever exist outside of software instruments, since it’s not a timbre that can be replicated with physical bells. It’s true that MIDI technology isn’t what created this bell sound – that would’ve been done with virtual instruments that have existed for decades – but MIDI is what allowed this bell sound to be pitched up and down, organized into a melody, and create the gothic-trap style lead that the song required.