A ShortMessage contains a MIDI message that has at most two data bytes following its status byte. The types of MIDI message that satisfy this criterion are channel voice, channel mode, system common, and system real-time--in other words, everything except system exclusive and meta-events. The ShortMessage class provides methods for getting and setting the contents of the MIDI message.

A number of ShortMessage methods have integer parameters by which you specify a MIDI status or data byte. If you know the numeric value, you can express it directly. For system common and system real-time messages, you can often use the corresponding fields of ShortMessage, such as SYSTEM_RESET. For channel messages, the upper four bits of the status byte are specified by a command value and the lower four bits are specified by a MIDI channel number. To convert incoming MIDI data bytes that are in the form of Java's signed bytes, you can use the conversion code given in the MidiMessage class description.