After finally getting my hands on a classic Roland SC-88 sound module and getting to experiment a little bit with its sounds and interface, the first thing that came to my mind was of course to compose a track in the style of the game music of the DOS era!
I had to do some serious digging in the user manual (yes, it came with the original manual too) in order to make this thing run smoothly using Reaper but in the end I was very happy with the result.
For extra authenticity I used the SC-55 sound map which in my opinion has less realistic but more "balanced" sounds.
So check it out and please let me know of your opinion!
Remembered I had new site and this thing called Kontakt and a buddy named Sam who keeps recording lots of things that make noise. So I finally got around to start The Second Sound Library for Kontakt which will eventually replace my somewhat unwieldy GM soundset for Kontakt page on the old blog. Also lots of brass and wind CC0 instruments from David Healey.
Flamestudio instruments are licensed under GPL, so why not make an SFZ version because the format's supposed to be more capable than SF2 (which the version was more limited than the original Gigasampler versions)? The original intention is to make a more accessible version that matches the original .gig files in terms of functionality and features.
Eventually all Gigastudio presets should carry over to every instrument without having to download Linuxsampler (which the plugin could not load on my Mac).
For the rest I just used Polyphone 1.9 to convert the SF2 versions to SFZ. I think I'd rather put out an incomplete beta version first and let someone finish the original Gigastudio programming ported over to sfz. Kinwie's not active as of 2018, so anyone else can help?
Note the instruments still have some problems. I really wish I could fix that but it would take some time to learn the workings of the SFZ format. Otherwise someone should step in and help complete this collection.
For example the last setting with the FS instrument name could not control the reverb tail and LFO no matter what setting I use. Only the vibrato and release...
I've been working on a new article about retro-style virtual orchestration the latest days (the inspiration came from doing this). But I'm kind of stuck as I can't come up with a) a good way of finishing it (I'm thinking maybe some mention of actually getting hold of the hardware itself?) and b) a fitting title. I know it's lengthy and maybe not very interesting for the majority of VO-minded people, but if you feel inclined and have the time I'd appreciate if you'd give this a look. I'll be posting it on my site once it's done, and it'll have some images to break up the wall of text (yay)!
David Healey put out samplesets for 17 instruments, usually a short and a sustain articulation with close to every note sampled and one velocity layer in mono. https://thesoundboard.net/viewtopic.php?...&start=100
I made some little Kontakt instruments for two of them with some editing and normalizing just to annoy everyone...
Sometimes I find myself longing back to simpler times, when all I had was 16 midi channels and a limited assortment of cheesy synth sounds to populate them.
This was done with the Yamaha S-YXG50, a VSTi version of the S-YXG50 software synth I used quite extensively back in the day. It may be nostalgia speaking, but I still think Yamaha XG sounds pretty damn great for being basically a souped-up version of the GM standard. And the S-YXG50 itself is impressive for being a 20 year old software synth -- that's a 4MB ROM and the built-in reverb BTW!
I really, really need to get myself an XG sound module. I miss this stuff.
I'm getting sick of blogs and would like to make a website, but all the simple website creation programs seem to be endlessly useless. How do I make a site on one of the free hosts with sort of basic pages with links to instrument downloads and maybe some embedded Soundcloud and Youtube demos? Any ideas?
