Aaron,
My personal favourite sites for Midi files of classic music are:
http://www.polleng.freeserve.co.uk/midi.htmlhttp://www.classicalmidiconnection.com/cmc/impress.html
I have no idea of the depth of your musical knowledge & experience so please forgive me if there is an element of teaching you to suck eggs (UK expression) in what follows – perhaps others might find it useful.
With a few exceptions nearly all midi files (professional or otherwise) are step recorded with Midi “Normal” fixed note lengths, velocity set at 64 and more often than not with a fixed tempo throughout.
Midi files are a great place to start – ‘Loosening them up’ as I call it, whilst laborious when you first start, is something that soon becomes second nature and over time you will instantly know what to change and how to do it.
Applications like Cubase and Logic etc have built in functions and tools such as drawing a curve over Velocity and the ability to change the midi clock value of notes etc which are of great benefit during this process – in practising these techniques you will get to the depths of your application and perhaps find it useful for your own compositions.
{And despite what some purists might think – playing with Midi files is an excellent method of increasing your musical vocabulary and your ability to compose and arrange your own pieces – what you see and the changes you have to make will only add to your knowledge}
What I tell my students to do (and indeed do myself) is get the score of the original piece and work with the two in parallel. Most of the most popular scores are often available at larger libraries in some countries and those that are copy write free (50 years after the composers death in the UK) can be copied and kept.
If you don’t yet read music – it really won’t take you long to learn – it is a comparatively easy language – Don’t confuse learning to play an instrument (difficult) with learning to read music (easy).
Tip. Learn a scale in one key and the rules for transposing rather than trying to learn them all by heart.
Apart from the common problems of fixed note length, fixed tempo and set velocities you will often find that the arrangement in lot of Midi files is musically wrong for working with samples.
Midi files are largely for Synths and there is tendency is to thicken the piece up by simply copying of tracks to another timbre (voice) often transposing in whole octave steps -- rather than transposing the voice to the correct compass of the instrument.
With VSL you will need to consider this to get the correct sound – such pure samples are very unforgiving of errors such as these and the result is often a muddy or poor mix.
There is a host of other support material available – my personal favourites are The Fundamentals Of Music and Arranging Techniques for Synthesizers and Samplers. I will dig out the ISBN numbers and post them later.
Fundamentals Of Music (first published in the 1950s) is aimed at Piano Students in grades 1-12 – however it is excellently laid out and whether you are a novice or a professional with many years of experience provides an instant ready reference to subjects such as Harmony, Structure, Cadences and instrument compasses.
Arranging Techniques – goes a step further and walks you through common everyday techniques and some the more exotic ones. Additionally it contains listings and progressions in scales and chords and voicing techniques.
Whoops got to do this post in two parts.