[Freepats] General MIDI instruments

[Roberto Gordo Saez]

There is only one message on this list for current month, so I've
decided to put the second one ;-)

I must say that I've almost stopped searching for samples. Most of the
maybe-free samples seems to be poor quality, specially compared to
IMIS ones. Also, I've discovered that sometimes when people say
"copyright free" they really mean "royalty free"...

It would be great to have at least a General MIDI set of instruments,
so I've made a short (uncompleted) list of samples we already have
(mainly from IMIS) that can be used on GM. There are comments below.

General MIDI melodic sounds

Piano

  1 Acoustic Piano -> IMIS Piano, Steinway & Sons
  5 Electric Piano 1 (Rhodes) -> Rhodes piano from freepats sf2 directory

Strings

 41 Violin -> IMIS Violin
 42 Viola -> IMIS Viola
 43 Cello -> IMIS Cello
 44 Double Bass -> IMIS Double Bass

Brass

 57 Trumpet -> IMIS Bb Trumpet
 58 Trombone -> IMIS Tenor Trombone (or IMIS Bass Trombone)
 59 Tuba -> IMIS Tuba
 61 French Horn -> IMIS French Horn

Reed

 65 Soprano saxophone -> IMIS Soprano Saxophone
 66 Alto saxophone -> IMIS Alto saxophone
 69 Oboe -> IMIS Oboe
 71 Basson -> IMIS Basson
 72 Clarinet -> IMIS Bb Clarinet (or IMIS Eb Clarinet)

Pipe

 74 Flute -> IMIS Flute


Orchestral instruments are difficult to synthesize in a realistic
manner, so it is good that we have the IMIS recordings for them.
Anyway, there are still lots of orchestral instruments missing.

I've seen the Violin Con Sordino (Muted) on the sf2 dir of freepats
site. Unfortunately, it can't be used because GM does not have a Muted
Violin, but it does have a Muted Trumpet instead for which I was
unable to found some decent patches :-(

AFAIK, General MIDI does not specify the sub-kind of instrument in
some cases, so we have to choose. For example, GM Trombone can be
taken from IMIS Tenor Trombone or Bass Trombone, and the same with Bb
Clarinet and Eb Clarinet. The oppose happens for other instruments
that have multiple kinds on different GM patches: Soprano saxophone,
Alto saxophone, Tenor saxophone, Baritone saxophone. In this case more
samples are needed as Tenor and Baritone are missing.

None of the samples are 192KHz, but at least having some good 44KHz
samples to start is better than nothing. Mark said that current raw
instruments on freepats GUS patches are mainly poor quality, I don't
know if we can save some of them. For now, I haven't counted on them.

It is not much, only 16 melodic patches for now. I've not checked drums status.

The following is a list of GM instruments that can be synthesized from
scratch. This is the case for all synth sounds on GM. In fact they
need to be synthesized in some way, since there is no "real" analog
instrument to record from ;-)

Bass

 39 Synth Bass 1
 40 Synth Bass 2

Ensemble

 51 Synth Strings 1
 52 Synth Strings 2
 55 Synth Voice

Brass

 63 Synth Brass 1
 64 Synth Brass 2

Synth Lead

 81 Lead 1 (square)
 82 Lead 2 (sawtooth)
 83 Lead 3 (calliope)
 84 Lead 4 (chiff)
 85 Lead 5 (charang)
 86 Lead 6 (voice)
 87 Lead 7 (fifths)
 88 Lead 8 (bass + lead)

Synth Pad

 89 Pad 1 (new age)
 90 Pad 2 (warm)
 91 Pad 3 (polysynth)
 92 Pad 4 (choir)
 93 Pad 5 (bowed)
 94 Pad 6 (metallic)
 95 Pad 7 (halo)
 96 Pad 8 (sweep)

Synth Effects

  97 FX 1 (rain)
  98 FX 2 (soundtrack)
  99 FX 3 (crystal)
100 FX 4 (atmosphere)
101 FX 5 (brightness)
102 FX 6 (goblins)
103 FX 7 (echoes)
104 FX 8 (sci-fi)


Sound Effects

Maybe sound effects (GM 121 to 128) can also synthesized. When making
real records for effects there is a problem with multiple pitches.
Different notes need to be artificially generated from the same
recording. I think a synthesized noise will sound better at different
notes for FX.

121 Guitar Fret Noise
122 Breath Noise: Should be easy to record a real one, but recording
the full set of different pitch breathings can be a challenge ;-)
123 Seashore
124 Bird Tweet
125 Telephone Ring: What kind of ring it sound should be? I don't
know, never used it... An old analog phone ring can be recorded, or it
should be easy to synthesize typical two tone ring produced by office
like phones.
126 Helicopter: OK, I understand that the applause, the guitar fret,
and even the seashore can be useful for music, but I've always
wondered about the usefulness of an helicopter noise as a standard
instrument (?). Anyway, I guess it should be synthesized.
127 Applause
128 Gunshot

Other electric instruments on GM can be synthesized, I think.

Some of the synthesized sounds can be directly taken from ZynAddSubFX
examples. I think examples are also under GPL, as the program itself.

Feel free to add (or change) things to this list.