I have heard some astonishing things done with General MIDI. You can do them, too, if you're willing to massage your tracks some.

A friend sent me a MIDI cover of a Beatles song with Paul playing the Hofner. As I recall, he mixed upright bass with a little steel-string acoustic guitar in the same octave to get the bottom along with the brightness of round-wound strings. It was very convincing, even on my cheap soundcard.

If I was going to do the same thing with upright bass, I'd likely try adding some fretless, especially if I was going to do much in the upper registers. Most GM uprights I've heard start sounding kinda 'tinky' up there.

I myself have done some beautiful things by mixing, say, piano voices with some of the GM pads. The results were great. The better your GM source, the better the results. Off the subject, possibly, but I never ran out of combinations I could use in GM.

Today this is called "layering" and is done routinely in software instruments such as Kontakt or Reason. But that's cheating, innit? I thought we were talking about straight GM.

In the mid 1990s I was limited to 16 MIDI tracks in whatever sequencer I was using at the time. Today we have 48 available in Real Band and effectively unlimited tracks in most mainstream DAWs. Layer away. Use The Force. Make Byootiful Music.

Richard

"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."