Yes, free – they’re great for analysis, and even for soundtracks

A company asked me to do a video for a reverb plug-in they were introducing, and I wanted to demo it with a variety of instruments. I had pretty much everything covered except for an acoustic piano piece, like something from Debussy, to demo the hall reverb sound. Spoiler alert: Not only is Claude Debussy dead, I don’t play like him.

However, the Yamaha Disklavier Education Network website has thousands of public domain classical music files in Yamaha Disklavier format, but also as Standard MIDI Files. I downloaded three sets of classical music files, auditioned them through the Waves Grand Rhapsody piano, and found the perfect Debussy piece for the demo.

Not only that, but the performance and sound were extremely convincing—it sounded like I had gone to great expense to hire and mic an accomplished piano player. The company was happy, so once again—MIDI to the rescue.