[Coco] ultimuse, midi, non standard keyboards

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 8:38 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
> On May 23, 2010, at 5:28 AM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>> I've been exploring the many MIDI files available for Ultimuse and
>> while some sound great, a lot seem to be set up for one particular
>> (non General MIDI) device.  This leads to some pretty strange sounding
>> songs in some cases.
>
> Yes, back in the day when GM still wasn't that common. My first two or three keyboards did not do General MIDI.
>
> For the non-MIDI folks, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface folks realized it was a problem that "sound #1" was a piano on some Roland keyboard, but sound #1 might be a trumpet on something from Yamaha, so they came up with General MIDI... It basically defined 128 voices where sound 1 was the same on any GM device. The actual quality of the sound might be different, but at least a piano would be a piano on any GM capable sound box or keyboard.
>
> The Yamaha PSS-480 was a tiny toy keyboard sold at places like Wal-Mart that had fantastic sound for it's time -- I always wanted one. It had MIDI and was cheap, too, which made is a very common MIDI sound device, so alot of stuff came out for it. There was also an MT32 box (Roland?) that was just a sound box with MIDI, and folks used it a ton.
>

I actually owned a PSS480 back in the day, it was a very fun synth.
The keys were 3/4 size, and with my huge hands not easy to play, but I
remember editing the sound parameters to make a lot of interesting
sounds.  It also had a very easy to use sequencer, much easier than
the 10x more expensive sequencer I have now.

Unfortunately the PSS480's sound map is very different than GM.  Some
of the other models used were closer, at least having voice 1 as
piano.

> Today, GM has pretty much killed all of that and everything supports it, but not so during the wild early days of MIDI and the CoCo!
>
>> I can certainly add a filter mode to DriveWire to map each model's
>> voices into a general midi layout in real time, but before I possibly
>
> That would be cool.
>

Check out the new beta package I put together this morning, it's got
profiles for PSS480 and a couple Casio's.  Not perfect but they make
songs arranged for those devices sound a lot better.
It's easy to add new profiles or improve the mappings I set up, it's
all done in config.xml.

I considered using Ultimuse to remap all the voice in each song, but 1
thats a lot of work and 2 this scheme works with any program.

> When I was using my Alesis sequencer, I would go in and manually do voice changes, and I think there was a way to do that on the COCO MIDI software too (Lester Hands, Speech Systems/Rulaford Research). Great times!
>
>                -- Allen
>
>
>
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