Marching Percussion sounds incorrect in MIDI file.
Hey, I am composing a stand tune for my school for next year. I am creating the battery parts for the song and when i saved the song as a midi file and played it. The rim shots where like closed high hats. The stick shots are whistles and tenor percussion sounds like jazz toms. Is there a plugin or patch that is available to fix this? I got the marching percussion from this post http://musescore.org/en/node/11722 and followed the directions to get the music and sound in the program. I just want the sound to be fixed on the MIDI file. If there is anything to fix it I will greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance.
P.S. I don't want to substitute the instruments using the concert band/orchestral percussion.
Comments
Did you play the MIDI file with an external player or sequencer outside MuseScore?
If so, unless you told it to use the Battery Percussion soundfont then it would default to the General Midi sounds, hence the reason for the instruments being wrong - and if you were using Windows Media Player there is no way to do that.
In general it is not a good idea to save in MIDI format unless you are wanting to further process performance in a sequencer.
MIDI is a device-dependent format.
If you want to save a performance you are better saving in WAV FLAC or OGG
Do post again if you need more help with this.
HTH
Michael
In reply to Did you play the MIDI file by ChurchOrganist
Okay, I understan and I appreciate it. Now is there anyway of modifiing the sound files to make the instruments more realistic. When I save my songs as a MIDI file and play it on my Droid Razr, the instruments sounds realistic like im listening to a professional group play it. Would you know how I can modifiythe sound file to make the percussion play too and have it all be realistic the way i just described to you?
In reply to Okay, I understan and I by MARTINEZ9000
You probably need to get onto the guy that made the soundfont.
Basically it is all down to sample quality, and the way they are manipulated in the soundfont.
If you have access to a decent computer system hooked up to a professional quality sound system then you potentially could tweak the SoundFont in an Editor such as Viena so that it sounds more realistic - playing with the reverb settings would probably improve it a lot.
It would be nice to know what tricks Motorola are using to fool your ears into believing you are getting professional standard sounds from the cheap sound chips they use in their Android phones :)
HTH
Michael
In reply to Okay, I understan and I by MARTINEZ9000
A MIDI file is not sound file. it is simply a set of instructions that say things like "play the note Bb using patch #37". So every program or device that reads that MIDI file is going to have its own notion of what "patch 37" is, and how it generates that sound. If the program or device on which you are playing back your MIDI file is not using the sounds you expect, you need to consult the documentation for that program or device to figure out how to get it to use the patch numbers that match the ones used in MuseScore. There is a standard called General MIDI that most programs and devices follow, that says which patch numbers should correspond to which sounds. The default soundfont used in MuseScore uses General MIDI patch numbers, but perhaps the program or device you are using to play th file does not. Or perhaps you are not using the default soundfont with MuseScore? If you are using some custom soundfont that is not General MIDI compliant, then you will need to somehow tell your other programs or devices what patch numbers are being used instead.
Generally, though, if you care how something sounds on playback, you shouldn't be using MIDI, but rather, an actual sound file like WAV (from which you can generate an MP3 using any number of free utilities if you don't like the size of the WAV file). Using a MIDI file and then expecting several different programs or devices to sound the same on playback is like handing a piece of paper that says, "paint a picture of a tree" to several different artists and expecting them all to produce the same result - same kind of tree, same colors, etc.