I want to brush up on my orchestral realism and sound mixing skills and was wondering if there's any decent source of MIDI for tracks from the likes of Danny Elfman, Ennio Morricone, John WIlliams, Hans Zimmer, Alan Silvestri, or anything else film or TV related ideally.

Any suggestions?!

 

Anyone?

 

Here are some

https://www.nonstop2k.com/midi-files/archive.php?key=hans-zimmer

http://www.vanbasco.com/search.html?q=Danny+Elfman&resultsperpage=10

http://johnwilliams.free.fr/midi.php?critere=film

 

https://musescore.com/

Although their first goal is sharing sheet music, almost each download has also midi included!

 

I have an annual subscription to musescore. That's where you found most of video game and film scores. unofficial score of course, but still the best you can find on the internet.

 

If you're searching for high-quality MIDI files of film and TV music, your best options depend on whether you need accurate recreations of famous soundtracks or original scoring templates for your own projects. For official soundtrack MIDIs, sites like MIDIworld or BitMidi sometimes host user-uploaded transcriptions of popular themes, though quality can vary. Enthusiast communities like VI-Control or film-scoring subreddits are also great places to find shared MIDI mockups of orchestral pieces by composers like Hans Zimmer or John Williams. If you're working with synth covers from YouTube, AI tools like Melody Scanner can help convert those audio tracks into usable MIDI files.

 

There was a time when people played famous segments of renowned SCORES on MIDI keyboards and transcribed everything from that (by ear!); or people with access to sheet music made partial transcriptions of these cues. However, over time, a vast collection of these MIDI themes gradually disappeared from the web, I believe due to copyright issues (a MIDI is a type of record of an author's work protected by some form of copyright—in this case, film scores are works purchased by movie studios). With the rise of piracy and the discussions surrounding copyright protection laws, I think these works were gradually removed and no longer uploaded. I remember finding, about 20 years ago (more or less), a partial transcription of John Williams' theme The City in the Clouds, which was quickly removed from the web (within 2-3 weeks). There was also a case involving one of those MIDI sites, where the author David Vincent was notified to remove large portions of the MIDIs he maintained. Even though, there are still MIDI portals with different categories (today, there are noticeably fewer film themes!), but they are now paid, so, another possibility is that the same authors thought: —why distribute my MIDI transcription work for free if I can monetize it? Anyway, my 'cent' worth of contribution to the topic.

 

Last edited: May 2, 2025

this so much.

there a few ringtone forums still up that have thousands of midi files , but searching those sites is headache inducing

 

I also feel that people who are big in music will eventually leave the internet. The internet has become a breeding ground for art theft and artists are very sensitive to it. In the future, the Internet will be like crowded city streets, with hapless people lining the entire street.

 

Last edited by a moderator: May 3, 2025