General MIDI: probably better than you remember (opinion talk) 

Totally agree that there are real workflow benefits to standardization, which would still be applicable to modern devices. Also think the ability to use one device and be able to make a complete song is so conducive to staying focused- not having to deal with selecting and managing many plugins or samples, but just jumping in and knowing what is available to you. Calling XG devices General MIDI might be a bit oversimplified- though it is accurate, being an eXtension of it ☺, since pure GM devices often did not have the advanced voice parameters, effects or wide range of voices that make XG and GS devices viable today. It would be awesome if there were an evolution of this now, with full-blown synthesizers of different types, patch- mapped to each of the standard voices.. Or does that already exist? I haven't used it, but maybe Korg Gadget can do this? The Pocket Miku is a recent XG-compatible device, other than channel 1 being locked to the eVocaloid part, not sure if it is still manufactured though.. It would have been cool if Yamaha had produced more devices with their NSX-1 chip architecture.

I remember some techno pioneer saying years ago that you can't have super rich characterful sounds for every part because it will swamp the mix. You need bread-and-butter sounds that fit together to create actual songs rather than interesting noises in isolation which sound terrible when put together.

I think General MIDI could be used as a great writing/composing tool. Like you said, you can always take the MIDI data and swap out the sounds with proper sounds later.

Hi Floyd. Great video essay about good old General MIDI Spec. I might add a few little great things about GM. First, channel 10, the GM standard drum channel, is still widely accepted as the standard channel for drums to this day, and the drum mapping of individual drum sounds is still widely used and respected, especially in the sampling community. This makes it very easy to write for audition various drumkits between disparate synthesisers and drum machines. Lastly, MacOS as well as Windows have always included a built-in General MIDI soft-synth bank for playing back General MIDI .MID files. What's great about this is that these banks in Mac and Windows are both sourced from sounds on the Roland SoundCanvas, which is the hardware synth series within which General MIDI originated. What this means is that we can compose in our computers using included system sounds, and later on, the same choices of sounds will play back properly on any General MIDI hardware synth or softsynth. This is not a small thing. I use a few general MIDI sounds to start sketching out every song I write. Often the bass and drums remain from the GM system sounds. The kick is great and the strings and basses are great too. Happy music-making! Best regards, Glenn in Rochester, NY, USA

General MIDI is a great way to exchange sequences that sound somewhat similar across receiving devices, and there’s an art to making GM sequences that sound decent. I’ve never used it much, but I do like to see MIDI sequences that people might post on the web, e.g. classical music, to be in that format. Apple QuickTime used to have an OK GM sound set for previewing sequences. This video made me realize I hadn’t used that in 15 years …

General midi sounds + modern effects = SO MANY POSSIBILITIES

Floyd! My studio is ready to film, unfortunately my stomach is not! So the last and the next few days I’ll will bring vintage stuff and doing my best with newer tech and updating long abandoned gear. I’m working on the QY -300 so far I was able to get a USB emulater with 32 pin connections, I got a so advertised floppy factory sealed floppy) I did laugh outlowd because it’s BS and funny at the same time. So afresh that I’m cleaning inside out with, That’s Right general cleaner and I’ve islis tried it sells for the circuit boards. It worked fine the first time, but I want it brand new! I really love the wood and plastic epoxy putty for any nicks, the the closest SEM color, the thing about SEM is it does best under 100 degrees iron on lay people mainly usit for vinyle and leather in cars,(and it not worth a dam on either) and I’ll cut a new plexiglas window, then replace light diodes new power brick, but back to the window, I’m going to ad led making nice and bright in any circumstance. A long experimental project, I plan to do it filmed.😮

Perfect timing, thanks Floyd 😀 Am having a re-look at my Yamaha PSR-350 home keyboard, it's sat dormant for years. Have also got a Worlde Easycontrol 9, which looks very similar to your Korg NanoKontrol 2. I'm wondering if the Worlde can control it in similar ways as you've shown in your last 2 videos... the PSR is General MIDI.

Hi Floyd. Thanks for this. I didn't know that general midi devices had editable synth parameters! I can't believe that I got to 57 without knowing that. Makes me excited to so some experimenting! Cheers!

Great video! Everything is absolutely correct! Many devices of this type, in fact, are not even half implemented in 2022! And given the fact that the interaction of old synthesizers and new devices is possible, this moment exceeds the possibilities by dozens of times! In my video, I also tried to show the capabilities of the Yamaha qy 70 multitimbrality

I think it's really useful. I have a QY300 which does General MIDI. I've been looking for a General MIDI plugin I can use in Reaper for quick ideas like the ID8 that comes with Reason and loads everything automatically when I load a sequence from Band in a Box. The Roland and Yamaha tabletop General MIDI boxes are going up in price as vintage gamers buy them for their PC game builds.

I am curious now, I wrote a song for sound canvas on the m8. it sends all the program changes etc so the sounds are setup correctly. I'll have to plug it into the qy100 and see what happens

That's a general i would gladly serve! Though it is to be considered what MIDI is to begin with. It's a wire protocol based on late 70s technology, using low-cost off-the-shelf parts to provide reliable and simple transmission of music commands at a throughput of like 3 kilobytes a second. I would struggle to call it slow for the time, it was pretty much state-of-the-art considering it had to be able to bridge some distance, be resistant to electromagnetically hostile environments, and not cause analogue signal faults and equipment misbehaviour such as the classic ground loop. The next step from there, how do you use it to describe not just device control, but an actual piece of music with meaningful instrumentation? You aren't going to be uploading samples at 3KB/s, that much is clear! No matter whether your devices can actually handle a decent amount of sample data, you just aren't going to get it transferred over MIDI. You need something more abstract than samples to describe the instruments, and GM is an easy solution. There are however a few "what might have been" sorts of things. GM is perhaps a regression compared to MT32, where you have patch editing and can compose partial samples into patches. What if that could be codified into a standard? On the other hand, GM is compatible all the way down to something like OPL2, specifically because it doesn't attempt to prescribe how the sounds are supposed to be produced. On the other hand pro devices did generally all extend GM, either with GS or XG. GM was supposed to be the lowest common denominator, not the ultimate solution.

Thanks for the topic. a.) Gave me a flash back into the old good times -- in the '90/'00 years I was tweaking midi files in cakewalk from my step-father so he can perform along b.)I just realised that my Yamaha MODX, has GM fully implemented ... with sound switching and CC automations etc ... wow need to dig all those old files out next time I am at my mothers place again ... thanks ... also totally agree that modern synth should use the at least the standard CCs for the few c.) I agree it really sucks that some synth manufactures do not consider the GM Midi in there CC Map. My MODX has those also for sent out ... works great with the MC707... but my Modal Cobalt as his midi map all over the place ... ;(.

I'm a huge fan of midi files since I was a child and thus GM (just as XG and slowly GS too) has a place in my heart. I got several devices and software that support it and also did songs of my own for the format. My latest GM/GM2/XGlite compatible device is the Korg Kross 2 from 2018. However, the sound set has a few flaws. Clavinet, accordion and baritone sax are in the wrong octave, and the sounds aren't always leveled equally. Synth Bass 1 is always faaaar too loud. And I don't know of a way to fix that.

i Got a SC-88PRO a year ago for not a lot of money. love the thing.

Hey Floyd, love your work. I use a QY100 and use a Novation impulse (sometimes Arturia keylab) to midi CC parameters, but can’t seem to control decay time? I use: Cut:74 res:71 att:73 release:72 What do you use for decay time? Also once these patches have changed is there a way to return them to their preset original state? Thanks Floyd. 🤘

Ex5 : that has a beautiful brass sound. I agree with the usability opinion

I just got a Roland #SC88VL to use with a Roland #PMA5 sequencer; I use a Korg MicroKontrol as a controller, it provides 8 knobs and 8 faders for CC parameters and 16 pads for drumming.

GM devices only sound as bad as the samples they use. I have a 20 year old Yamaha GM keyboard, and it still sounds great! These days, I do a lot of my work with a GM soundfont. You mentioned how the file size was an advantage in the 90s due to the limited storage space. I'd like to add network speed to that, too. Back in the early days of the WWW, the speed of a dial-up connection meant that having enough recorded audio could make your web page too slow to use. It was a lot easier to load your pages up with MID files, instead. I think this was probably a huge factor in the "MIDI sucks" mentality of the time, because so many people were listening to GM on their aunt's Geocities page, but nobody really understood that the sounds were actually coming from their cheap soundcard.

Might just dig out the old mt32 and have a play. I will generally start building a song with the GM sounds, they usually give a really good basis to start with, and then swap them out as and if I need to.

General MIDI is a concept, and a great one. It can sound as good or as bad as the instrument designers make it. That said, everyone needs a Sound Canvas.

GM was a great idea in the days where memory was small and expensive! Also, I never though it sounded particularly bad, but it tended to sit in synths which weren't tweak-friendly so you tended to wear out your ears on those 128 presets pretty quickly. Although, it would be fun if someone made a 100Gb BBC Orchestra style GM set. I'd love to play 'Canyon' through that! 😁

I still use Roland SC8850/88pro & Yamaha TG300 to listen to GS/GM midi, the sound designers and music in the 90s were better than now

i am using a MAX4LIVE device as interface between nanoKontrol and my EX800, it takes a lot of decisions and midi mapping, because its custom firmware.

Funny you made this video Floyd, I was just playing with the GM stuff today on my Yamaha PSR S770 just for kicks, and it’s just as lame as it always was but your certainly right about the standards it put in place with midi files and channels! The sounds just suck. Lol

Vive le General MIDI ! :)

I knew GMIDI starting from the sonic & knuckles collection this year, playing the MIDI version I actually quite liked it, now i have a thing for general MIDI music, it has quite the potential (except for ice cap zone to be honest, the MIDI version actually composed that horribly)

I miss General MIDI. There is nothing in the standard that says you can't add specialized modulators to your General MIDI synth.

It is not bad considering the advanced capabilities of modern DAW's. If you use it alongside other plugins, it can still be easily integrated today. Back then, you sometimes only had a GM-synth, which of course sometimes sounded a bit uninteresting. But today we have more possibilities to polish the sound.

Hello there. General MIDI has the high ground. I still love some of the standard midi sounds, especially if you tweak em a bit with modern plugs etc. The brass sounds for instance can sound great- they don't sound much like brass, of course.

i love midii!!

General MIDI isn’t harming anyone. It’s a great way of exchanging musical data with a base instrument set defined. Once you get it into your DAW or hardware device, you can reassign the sound along with editing the data itself. Once it’s a stem or audio file, a lot of your flexibility is lost. GM is a great basic “rules of the road” tool. While the instrument pool may be lackluster, it’s just a starting point and a common vocabulary. If you don’t need it, great but it presence doesn’t deprive anyone of creation possibilities. Most of the devices you show aren’t GM compatible so no need to test them. Alot of digital pianos are GM capable. From workstations to entry level learning models. I get why synths and samplers don’t tend to support GM…but they should where possible.

Any suggestions in the

MIDI is disappearing as well not just GM / GS / XG etc. Luckily I am not swayed by music fashions that come and go. So the sounds in the GM set cover everything I wish to do, and a bit of editing can shape them in a lot of ways.

Unfortunately, I never learned how to read and write music at school. In 1993 I bought my first PC and discovered that it can do this for me! So I bought Logic Audio and a Yamaha DB50-XG, a couple of sheet music too... First exercise was: painstakingly and eagerly copied note by note Sergei Prokofjew's "Peter and the Wolf" in Logic Audio and programmed the DB50-XG to conjure something nice out of it.. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NZ0SHFu7gJE.html In this way I was able to play an entire orchestra without even knowing a single note or even having heard of music theory! ;-) With pure GM sounds I certainly wouldn't have worked on it for long! With the DB50-XG, the sounds of the "QS300 (Raver's Babe)" could be programmed and played 100%! However, GM and XG are worlds apart! GS is a bit nicer than GM, but XG with the DB50-XG was a bang in midi heaven! The Yamaha XG synthesizers DB50XG, SW60XG and MU10 have an AMAZING FEATURE: They have User RAM for patch data into which Voices from Yamaha's legendary QS300 can be loaded. Sounds programmed in this way have no effect on other Yamaha XG tone generators! And my favorite version of Mussorgsky's - Pictures at an Exhibition still is my own made for the DB50-XG!

cmon look at the doom music community, they always use midi and i think they sound bomb

Probably* title typo

😊I know my comments are almost letters but I would really like to know what you think of the idea, I know I told you I’m full government approved disabled. Whatnot gent a month is totally unexeptable., I can’t get a job! But I’ve make enough to live on! I’m 60 who in they’re right mind would hire knowing I can’t lift I can’t push, I’ve got afib, more scary to them is dilated aorta,at some it will have get some attention! So Anyway since the QY-300 uses floppy’s I’m not exempt from making it with the times, I have all tools, and more ( I’ll explain that in second),so I make enough a month to cover my RU-vid expenses, barely, interesting gear, interesting builds and rebuild.,the more, I have building and repairing, wood, leather, plastic forever, but I went to school for coding (windows 95 era) a 12 TB harddrive still a wet dream! Okay, I’m really sorryif I’m boring most of you! The deal is I want a brand new modern QY-300! Now I believe the gear is only propietyn for 14 years. I want rewrite all the code into a touchscreen! I’ll to have make a lot of notes but I think I can do it! I’ve already replaced the floppy with a usb, next will add two USb A and two USB c since all the busses are a strait line on the back of the board I would turn everything midi as well. What would you opinion of that be? Making use of old gear, make the reinvent a kit, accuse of stealing, wasting my time? Ty all!