OK, I had to give this a try with soundfonts.

I have re-started trying the "Blues You Can Use" guitar series again and I have been recreating the lesson tracks in BIAB to have a track with no guitar in them for practicing. On this one (lesson #4), I decided to use brass and I needed a better sound.

I created a Blues song using the style BEEBSHUF. It doesn't have a brass section, but I changed the OverDrive guitar to brass. I then sent the files to Sonar and it sounded pretty MIDI. I then went back to BIAB, changed the brass to the GM2 Brass 2 and exported that to Sonar. So I had two tracks of Brass which played slightly different stuff. I added some reverb/trem/chorus to try and make it more life like, but it's still pretty cheesy. Soundfonts to the rescue?

1.) Went here and got a free SFPlayer: http://virtualturntable.fourstones.net/free-vst-soundfont-player

2.) Went here and got a brass soundfont: http://www.thejazzpage.de (scroll down to get to the downloadable sound fonts). I've only used the "BrAss" soundfont. It's an "archived file", so I had to go to
http://www.melodymachine.com to get the unPack program for these soundfonts.

3.) I then passed the midi file from BIAB over to Sonar and tried to work with it there. Didn't like how it was going, so I tried to see if I could get it to work in BIAB.

4.) I got BIAB to recognize the SFPlayer (Audio menu --> DXi Synth Settings ...), but then the SFPlayer would only play ALL the midi channels through the Brass setting (ha, ha). No big deal. I switched to the VSC Dxi and output all of the midi tracks to audio and then switched to the Brass thing to just output the brass stuff.

So now I have my song file with 3 tracks of brass (ha, ha). I've got lots more to do -- but here it is for now.

5.) Pulled all the audit files into Sonar and poof! The brass doesn't sound too bad. I really need to do the soundfont thing on one other brass track and only have two tracks of brass. Right now it is a little bit of an overkill. I switched the drum set to RealDrums, but everything else is midi.

Basic Blues with 3 tracks of brass. Two VSC DXi tracks and 1 sound font track: http://soundclick.com/share?songid=7507227

Did any of this make any sense?

Kevin

Last edited by Kemmrich; 04/10/09 01:23 PM.