Superior GM playback?

[alby]

I have used a variety of hardware based, standard MIDI file playback devices live for many years.

 

For the last bunch of years however, I have pretty much settled on the Roland JV1010 / XP50 GM sound set. After all, Roland was in on GM from the very beginning, and the Roland GM sound set is pretty much the industry standard.

 

But, is there anything hardware based that really stomps on the Roland GM sound set as found in the JV1010 / XP 50 etc. I do not mean extended sound sets such as XMF (eXtensible Music Format).

 

By that I mean higher sampling rates, more and longer multi-samples on keys, strings woodwinds etc, velocity cross-fading instead of simple filtering, longer decays, physical modeling, higher quality multi-effects etc. You get the idea, not simply a generic bunch of samples and typical effects.

 

Put it this way, Roland has moved far ahead of the XP / JV series ROMplers, but the GM sound set has not followed suit, and is now relegated to an unimportant part of newer boxes.

 

I figure I could edit up such a beast with something like GigaStudio plus plug-in effects, but for live use I much prefer a rack-mount hardware-based beast. Although if you know of an all-in-one sample playback application, already tuned up for GM use, I

[The Pro]

The added factor to large samples is the time it takes to load them, so you have to decide how important instant-sound switching is and for that matter how important SMF's are to your live act.

 

Some of the best GM playback I've ever heard came from the old Kurzweil K2000's GM soundset, and they allowed instant sound switching. You might can pick up a rack mount version of that cheap these days.

 

The Motifs have maintained a GM soundset and rack versions are common.

 

If price is no object, one monster rack mount GM playback device would likely be a Muse Receptor loaded with Colossus. I don't know how well Receptor/Colossus would work live though because the samples are so large there may be significant load time between sounds. I use Colossus in the studio and it sounds great but certainly it's too time consuming for instant-loading of sounds for live SMF use. However, you could get pragmatic and use Colossus at home and use MP3's live... noone in the audience wiill know the diff.

 

I had an idea that you could load Native Instrument's Bandstand onto a flash drive and use it with a laptop for GM and get instant-sound switching but I've never tried it.

 

BTW: I use SMF's with modified GM/XG patches live in my soloact and my playback device is a Yamaha 9000 Pro arranger keyboard with a hard drive installed. I also use MP3's.

[alby]

Cool ideas!

 

I don

[Meatball Fulton]

I've never understood why GM sounds are inferior in top-of-the-line synths.

 

I own a Motif ES6 and the GM sounds aren't bad but why do they use a lesser piano in the GM bank...there's really no point when they have much better factory piano patches onboard already.

[alby]

I agree with you a billion times over brother!!!

 

What the hell is the point of all that power in cool new synths just to have some old average sounding patches for GM playback? Why don