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Technical notes on my Midi files and on Hardware


The General Midi files in the section Compositions were sequenced using Midisoft Studio for Windows (vs. 4, 5 and 6). I inserted the notes one by one for each instrumental part during the process of composition, afterwards fine-tuning very many individual "midi events" to create more subtle dynamic accents and better phrasing. A few special sections were made using a Roland midi keyboard.
I have used the following midi effect controllers for each track: 10 pan; 11 expression; 91 reverb. The values for controllers 64 and 93 have to be set at zero to exclude unwanted effects. You may have to adjust some settings (midi volume, velocity) to create a good overall volume level and good balance between the different instruments on your soundcard. You may notice that I put the 1st violins to the left and the 2nd violins to the right of the listener, which makes them both stand out more in contrapunctal passages. You can change this if you like, altering the values for controller 10.

The files require a very high quality wavetable soundcard that can handle all instruments simultaneously and maintain tempo as well, and reproduce all reverb and pan effects. Please note: it is useless playing my music with the standard Windows midi-player or a standard soundcard, as the result will be very disappointing.
My first soundcard, a Roland RAP10, had a very good overall Midi sound in a ROM wavetable, but I was not very happy with the sound of the violins (Program Changes 40, 41, 48 and 49). For this reason, I avoided violin solos and long passages for strings only.
Then I tried an AVM-Apex Pro soundcard. This had a 2 MB ROM-wavetable which was inferior to the RAP 10's, but its main attraction was the Kurzweil MA-1 synthesizer chip and its capability to load up to 64 MB of sound samples. Installing it was not a simple matter of plug-and play. For some reason, the wavetable driver failed to load from time to time when starting up the computer. Furthermore, there were not many good samples easily available, and creating good samples myself proved practically impossible. They resulted in very large files which took far too long to load and were playing back erratically when used in Midi music. Finally, after about six months, I abandoned my struggle with the Apex.
Very recently I bought a Yamaha SW1000XG which has been producing very good initial results. There will of course always be a difference between a soundcard and a live orchestra, but I believe the Yamaha comes closer than most other cards. I'm still busy learning to use its many possibilities.

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