Decent Harpsichord Soundfonts

• Nov 23, 2016 - 01:05

I'm looking for some decent harpsichord soundfonts online. So far, I have Sonimusicae's two harpsichords and the Campbell Harpsichord. Any others worth using (that are also free?)

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• Dec 31, 2016 - 04:24

No need to apologize for the late reply. A reply is a reply.

I already have the Blanchet (Sonimusicae,) as mentioned in my previous post. I will, however, download the Zell. Does the Zell work for Musescore, or just Hauptwerk/GrandOrgue?

UPDATE: It appears there is no sf2 file found in the .zip folder. Only WAV files for each indivdual note and stop. Any loopholes? WAV to sf2 converter you know of?

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• Jun 2, 2019 - 04:04

I looked at the Sonimusicae harpsichord, but at 214 MB decompressed, it's just way too big for inclusion into my General MIDI SoundBank. Smaller loads faster in all of my playback software, and I can only manage about 150 MB of patience for the entire SoundBank.

I found a tiny but robust 210 K free harpsichord SoundFont made and offered by John W. McCoy at http://www.realmac.info/hpschd2.htm If you mouse over the pictures at the top of his website page, you can listen to two different sample midis of his harpsichord SoundFont.

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• Jun 2, 2019 - 14:50

As a general feature, many sampled libraries (not all of them) contain more than one sample per note, to provide more velocity layers or to provide some sort of "round robin" feature. Chances are that your 214 MB sampled harpsichord is no exception to this rule, in which case you could delete the multi-samples used for the "round robin" sake, keeping just one sample for each note. This way, you can PROBABLY downsize the library a lot. Of course, you should modify the sample-map as well, but this shouldn't be such a hard task.

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• Jun 2, 2019 - 16:46

I understand how to downsize a sample library for MB economy, but my knowledge of how to build a harpsichord from scratch is next to nil and I will probably never write a score for one unless I'm dressing up for a Medieval Faire. What I appreciated most about the McCoy harpsichord was how he was able to take a very basic and small sound palette and extend that into a full array of 16 distinctly different sounding harpsichord instruments and combinations. It sounds just like a harpsichord to me, instantly recognizable for what it is supposed to be, without any obvious piano synthesizer undertones to spoil the effect. He's getting the Mighty Mouse award from me while I study how he did that. There are other instruments that I would like to apply that same technique to.

In general, I don't hear a whole lot of difference in the .wav sample velocity layers of the mega-MB instruments with the exception of sounds that I don't want to hear coming out of the instrument anyway, such as a hammered piano or the thwang of a guitar or the squeak of a saxophone that misjudged his breath. For my own instrument designs, I've been using the low-pass filter to change the resonance, giving the impression of a velocity change in the dynamic change of voice without actually adding any excess .wav samples to the MB total. The five layer Yamaha Diskclavier Piano has been whittled down to two velocity layers in the wave samples with 5 different resonance voices, for example, only because I can clearly hear the difference between "loud" and "not loud" in those two selected velocities to want to include them both.

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