Quote:

<...>There are a couple of inherent problems with uploading a midi GM file. Let’s say you have a perfect sounding trumpet in your GM set and you have set its pitch bend range to +/- one half semitone. This adds life to your sound. You up load that file and someone else downloads it and plays it on their GM set. It can sound terrible because the trumpet sound is not the same and their pitch bend range is set at the normal +/- 2 semitones. That is why most GM midi files are note on and note off only. Controllers can make a mess of everything.<...> MarioD



The General MIDI specification is for pitch bend to be set at +/- 2 semitones. Any deviation from that is not GenMIDI.

There are continuous controllers that can be used to change the Pitch Bend range. In order, set cc100=0 cc101=0 cc6=n (where n=the number of semitones the pitch can vary). So if I want a full octave of pitch bend for say a bass slide at the beginning of the song in successive clock ticks I set cc100=0 cc101=0 cc6=12. At the end of the song I'll repeat the procedure and change cc6=2 to reset my synth to the GM standard.

And once again, for those new to MIDI, neither GM or any other MIDI has any sound. General MIDI simply specifies which patch (or program) number equates to which instrument. So for example, patch 33 will play Acoustic Bass on all GenMIDI synthesizers. It doesn't specify whether it should sound like an Ac.Bass with nylon strings, steel strings, with good fidelity or bad sounding. That's up to the synth manufacturer. The GM spec does say that the pitch bend should be set to 2 semitones but as noted, gives you the opportunity to change it.

Most if not all computer sound cards have lame MIDI synths. The sound cart itself probably costs from $10 to a couple of hundred for top of the line (most computers come with bottom-of-the-line sound cards installed). I've seen Dell cards for as little as $16. And the sound card does two functions, MIDI synth and sound wave (audio) reproduction. Since most computer users are not musicians and the MIDI sounds are used predominantly for games, the sound card company puts most of their engineering dollars in the audio reproduction aspect of the sound card so that YouTube, WAV, and other audio formats sound right. After all, that is what most computer users want. What kind of a MIDI synth do you think you are going to get for $16 even if it wasn't sharing duty with raw audio?

I have 3 hardware synths with General MIDI sound banks on them, and I can exchange files between all 3 plus the semi-lame VSC software synth and they will all play the same song, with the same expression, and the same pitch bend. The individual instrument sounds on all 4 are different.

With hardware synths and MIDI, I can expand my sounds. My SD90 has over a thousand different voices in it. Just for guitars I have strats, teles, 335s and many others, some with front or back pickup choices. If I don't like the guitar sound on a song, I can change it. Or even change the synth, the i3 and sc55 have some great guitar sounds. Even my lowly pre-GM MT32 has a couple of good ones.

Another good thing about hardware MIDI synths, is I don't need a huge hard drive to carry along my RealTracks. There are only two kinds of computer users. Ones who have had a hard drive failure, and ones who haven't had a hard drive failure yet!

I can keep expanding my voices without using up computer hard drive space.

I can mix the voices from a dozen different synths, taking the best voice of each for the particular song I'm working on, and there is no latency to speak of (different software synths have different latency specs so it's hard to blend them), and there is no loading of the computers CPU.

And when I get a new computer, simply plug the USB port to my synth array to the new computer, and I'm good to go.

And I can manipulate the continuous controllers to get more expression out of them than I can with audio loops.

There is one thing I'd like to see PG Music do in the MIDI department though. Change the MIDI resolution from 120ppq to at least 240ppq. A clickable resolution of 240, 480 or 960 wouldn't be bad either.

As you can tell, I'm a big MIDI fan. IMHO with a decent MIDI sound module, you can make your music MUCH more expressive, MUCH more varied, and MUCH better than you can with audio loops. Expressiveness trumps tone any day of the week.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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