Any suggestions for good orchestral instrument midi sounds?

[Peter Tourin]

Hi all -

I'm looking for some soundcard advice. I need to build a setup for putting together a demo for an opera. The composer has done a score reduction in Finale 2001. It's mostly 4-part now, and he's ready to start moving from the score reduction into individual instrument tracks.

I'm looking for a soundcard with good general MIDI sounds for orchestra instruments and a line input for audio tracks. I'm thinking that we'll build up the instrumental tracks, and bring in some singers and home record vocal parts for the moment - then once the project is further along, probably re-record the vocal tracks in a studio setting.

Does anyone have any soundcard suggestions that will give us reasonable track sounds? I suppose another possibility is an external synth, but I've never looked into them - again, any suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks - Peter

[manning1]

you might want to tap the minds of some band in a box users at the pgmusic.com forum. a lot of them get into quite advanced midi work and also use finale. frankly i think you will find that youll need to look at
external midi modules driven by midi out of the pc. some of the modules have thousands of excellent sounds. maybe test drive a few at a dealers or rent some to try, and find the patches that sound most musical for your orchestral work. many can be tweaked heavily as well a thousand ways.

[TimOBrien]

You don't need a soundcard that has the orchestral sounds built-in.

You can replace any MIDI sound using a sampler VSTi.
(Look for Kontact, Halion, VSampler, GigaStudio, etc.)

Garritan Personal Orchestra is highly rated and is about $250.
It includes all the sampled instruments and notation software, too.

One easy (and free) way to do it is with soundfonts:
Download the free soundfont VSTi "sfz" from rgcaudio.com
(read the directions there on how to use it...)
Then download a big General MIDI soundfont from www.hammersound.net and load it up in "sfz" then point your MIDI tracks to output to it.

[Garry Sharp]

Another vote for Garritan Personal Orchestra. It even comes with a version of Finale, but the main thing is the quality of the sounds. You do need a meg of RAM though.

www.garritan.com.

[mshilarious]

Hey guys, I sent the poster over here, there is one other issue:

Their best available PC at the moment is a 800mHz; they mainly plan to hash out the MIDI & guide vocals on their box and transfer to a studio for the samples & vocal recording. Thus my advice was to get a serviceable GM card with a decent A/D converter to keep the cost down.

As I have now exhausted my knowledge of MIDI, I shall bow out.

[Peter Tourin]

Originally Posted by TimOBrien

You can replace any MIDI sound using a sampler VSTi.
(Look for Kontact, Halion, VSampler, GigaStudio, etc.)

Garritan Personal Orchestra is highly rated and is about $250.

One easy (and free) way to do it is with soundfonts:
Download the free soundfont VSTi "sfz" from rgcaudio.com
(read the directions there on how to use it...)
Then download a big General MIDI soundfont from www.hammersound.net and load it up in "sfz" then point your MIDI tracks to output to it.

This is all news to me, and it sounds pretty interesting. Am I correct that if you buy Garritan you're paying "package price" for their good samples and not having to hunt - if you get Sfz and go to HammerSound or wherever else, you're populating your GM software synth instrument by instrument, and trusting to various people's sampling skills ??

Also, when Finale advertises their SmartMusic soundfont, is that another software based set of sounds?

The other issue is the hit on the PC if we go with software sounds. A gig of memory is maybe about $140, so that's not horribly painful. Is there also a big processor hit? If so, I'm thinking that the 800 mHz PC we were intending to use may get stretched a bit thin....

Also, are there any good articles explaining this stuff? I assume that VST means the whole range of software based sampled sound, that VSTi is an individual instrument, that Sfz is... -- I'm not sure what it should be called, but it's a soundfont software package that'll act like a synth, and you load individual VSTi's into it. And that Garritan is supplying some equivalent of Sfz, populated with their own sampled instruments. Do I have this more or less right?

Lots of changes in a few years - this is gonna be fun....

Peter

[Garry Sharp]

Not far off Peter. Soundfonts are samples in a particular format, and Sfz is a player that supports that format. GPO uses a tailored version of Kontakt to do the same thing for its own set of samples.

VST doesn't mean the whole range of software sampled sound, its a protocol which enables you to put effects and sounds into a sequencer. VSTi means VST Instrument, that is one that you can "play" from MIDI (either recorded or played in from a keyboard). Both Sfz and GPO's player are VSTi's.

I don't know about the soundfonts Tim mentioned, theyd' certainly save you some cash, but the GPO stuff is first rate and, as you say, you wouldn't have to hunt around. As well as the Finale version there's also a Cubase sequencer in there.

You'd need to check their site to see if your CPU spec is up to it.

Have fun.

[Peter Tourin]

Garry -

Thanks for the definitions - that all makes sense now. Like Mshilarious says - the original object was to put this project on our slowest desktop machine, which was fine back when we were doing Finale note-by-note data entry using the cheesy sounds on the on-board synth. Well, the on-board synth is now history, as we changed from Win98 to Win2000 on that PC and don't have drivers. So now we're trying to figure out which PC is going to do what.

It looks to me like we need to have a fast PC - having a software based sound library is very appealing to me. We could playback from Finale or from whatever sequencer/editor we decide to buy, using whichever VSTi we decided on. The editors are pretty cheap, so it seems to just be a matter of picking something - CoolEdit/Cakewalk/Cubase, all in the same territory.

So it appears that we could finish the instrumental tracks, add "first attempt" solo vocal tracks and possibly do the chorus tracks all on that one PC, then just head to the studio for the final vocal takes.

There's another possibility I never thought of. We have a Sony GRZ600 notebook that'd almost cut the Garritan specs -- 2 ghz pentium, 40 mb HD (don't know if that'd be enough), 256 mb (we'd have to buy more memory). Then we'd also be portable - pick up something like the Lexicon Omega Studio, which is USB2, get some singers and borrow a local hall for the chorus stuff - I'd have to figure out how to set up a bunch of earphones for the singers, but it could be done....