On Friday, October 19, 2007 9:15 AM,
Leonard de Ruijter happened to mention in passing:
Hello all,
When i record my songs with my keybord and save them and play them in a
program like winamp, i hear only the drums and all the other channels
are in piano, not the voices i have chosen on my keybord. what can i do
with that problem?
leonard,
Your keyboard is possibly not general midi. So upon playback you will get
sounds that might not work for other synths. Can you be more specific?
You play your midi files back in winamp. Through what, your keyboard or
another synth? If your keyboard, then before saving, make sure you fill
out all values in the track properties. This is a common mistake amonghst
users. I have several unwritten rules when writing midi files.
1. Even on a synth that does not adhere to volume control, pan, reverb or
chorus or even bank in some cases, I set generic values. For example
addictive drums. This synth requires that you make all changes through the
UI and not through QWS, but my values are subconcious to the point where I
set bank and patch at 0, volume at 100, pan at 64, reverb and chorus at 0.
It doesn't matter the synth won't understand these, it's the principle of
the thing. To me it constitutes good midi practice. so back to what I was
saying.
With that in mind, there are some synths that, if they are GM2, will
understand fake GM versions on bank 0, and yet others that absolutely
require you to use 15488 and upwards, and 15360 for drums and upwards as
required. Maybe your synth is one of those, or maybe your playback device
has different bank requirements to that of your keyboard. Without further
information I'm not sure what else to suggest.
I can only suggest to each and every one of you though, that just because
you can hear a sound playing when you choose it's bank and patch numbers,
do not leave the other values at -1 because if you play another midi file
which had a fade out and a pan all the way across at 0, and you come back
to this particular midi file, you will be annoyed. Even if the track your
working on sounds fine now, for your own sake and those others you might
send the midi too in the future, set all values. It takes that bit longer
but it's worth it as you won't get nothing playing at all in some cases, or
127 chorus in other cases.
For synths that actually support all the generic midi changes I tend to
find that the below values work:
Bank & patch as required.
Volume usually 100. Pan 64. Reverb anywhere from 10 on XG style synths to
40 on Roland GS. Chorus optional, but again not -1. 0 or something else.
I hope this helps some of you. Thanks.
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