Apparently-To: john.smith@gravis.com


GUS Musician's Digest       Fri, 5 Nov 93  3:30 MST      Volume 2: Issue   5  

Today's Topics:
                     GUS Musician's Digest V2 #4
                              New Pianos
                          Piano Patch Stuff

Standard Info:
	- Meta-info about the GUS can be found at the end of the Digest.
	- Before you ask a question, please READ THE FAQ.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 4 Nov 93 10:41:49 CST
From: cowles@hydra.convex.com (John Cowles)
Subject: Re: GUS Musician's Digest V2 #4

Francois Dion writes:
> 
> Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1993 23:59:54 -0500 (EST)
> From: dionf@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Francois Dion)
> Subject: Banks
> 
> Something may complicate the bank assignments: there are not only 128 banks,
> but 1024 banks (or so i'm told). But i'm not 100% sure and if it's the case
> i dont see how you can have that many banks selected thru controller 0 since
> it is a midi controller and the value is probably 1 byte with parity which
> means 128 values... In any case this should be cleared soon, when the drivers
> come out. For now, except for bank 8 people seem to say "assignment as the
> patches come out"...
> 
> Ciao,
> -- 
> Francois Dion
This is no problem. Midi specifies TWO controllers for bank select, with
Controller 0 being the Most Significant Bytes and controller 32 being the
least significant bytes. If there are less than 128 banks, you can disregard
controller 32 and use just controller 0. So, bank 300 would be

 Controller 0  -   2
 Controller 32 -  44

As a matter of fact controllers 0-31 all have extensions in controllers 32-63.

John
-- 
     John Cowles        cowles@hydra.convex.com   CompuServe: 72074,451
                        Convex Computer Corp.  214 497 4375
                        3000 Waterview Pkwy
                        Richardson, Tx. 75080

------------------------------

Date: 3 Nov 1993   15:52:13 PST
From: chrisw@leland.Stanford.EDU
Subject: Re: New Pianos

------------

>>As a side note, the samples in piano*.pat seem to be very hard key hits. 
>>The way they sound, I would think that they are the loud layer of a
>>velocity-switching patch. 

No. They are the only layer of a patch in a machine with programmable
real time filters on each voice. The tonal variation on the original is
done by having the key velocity affect filter cutoff.

I'll check out your envelopes later...

Chris.

------------------------------

Date: 4 Nov 1993   02:20:07 PST
From: chrisw@leland.Stanford.EDU
Subject: Piano Patch Stuff

------------

Well checked out Phat's piano2a.pat. It's got one obvious problem in the 
octave above middle c where the notes go kind of short and choppy all of
a sudden. More importantly, I found it a bit too sloppy to play on a keyboard
and it just didn't sound right on swngcafe.mid (my test standard). 

However, since no-one has come up with any solutions to the note
resurrection problem I agree that it's probably sensible to knock the 
reverb off completely like Phat has done.

So, I've made a new piano2.pat which no longer has any fake reverb on it and
therefore no longer has notes come back from the dead.

BTW, an amazing bit of trivia: the windows midi drivers and playmidi seem
to differ substantially in their interpretation of how a patch should
sound. (Playmidi has longer decays for the same patch). Odd.

Something went wrong with my download of piano2b.pat so I can't comment on
it I'm afraid. My guess is that it might have an uncommon resemblance to 
my new piano2.pat. For those who haven't tried patch editing themselves,
the resolution of patch decays is actually very rough for the sort of lengths
we're using here (move one pixel to the right and it doubles!).
So there really aren't that many possibilities.

The criminal thing about downloading this stuff is that there's only about 150
bytes that are being modified out of the 200000 but you've got to download
the lot. The only alternatie is to supply seven seperate envelope files
and tell people to load them in using patch.exe themselves. But that would
be pretty tedious and patch.exe would probably crash on you anyway :-)

Chris.

------------------------------

End of GUS Musician's Digest V2 #5
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