...Finish, Patch it over my SB Live, and found only the kick sounds real, while the hihat, cymbals, and other "Hi Freq" perc things sound terrible... really bad enough...
-Soundfonts don't sound that great when just run straight. None of mine do.
Try this:
1. Copy the first soundfont track to a second track.
2. Mute the first track.
3. In track #2, remove all but one single instrument (MIDI key, that is). Just leave one drum, or one cymbal--delete everything else. To clarify: for instance, leave the kick drum, and erase everything else in track #2.
4. Mix track #2 down to audio in track #3.
5. Put para-EQ on track #3 and adjust to taste. (You can now delete track #2; you've still got all of the same/original MIDI notes in track #1)
6. Now go through the rest of the percussion, and do the same for each different
sound: each different drum and cymbal should be mixed down into its own audio track, and get its own parametric-EQ adjusted to taste.
7. Now mix down all the para-EQ'd separate percussion audio tracks to a single stereo track. Compare this to track #1, which is the original straight soundfont--you should hear a
big improvement particularly from soundfonts that use real samples.
I don't know why this works but it does, and I ain't complainin'.
~
To load or unload soundfont banks:
---In Cakewalk, the Cakewalk help files tell how to do it. Note that a soundfont "counts" as a MIDI instrument, so you can only use 16 different soundfonts maximum at a time (each has to be on its own channel). ~~~ CHS2002 has a bug regarding soundfonts; you select them by the "bank" drop-down box for each MIDI track in the normal view, but you should always just type the number of the bank in the box. If you hit the drop-down arrow so you can see the names, the names often don't display properly (they might, might not) and the bank may not load. The soundfont settings are saved with the project and are supposed to re-load automatically, but may not. Some soundfonts in particular cause problems with this, the rest of the time, I don't know what causes it-? For me, often just opening the soundfont-attach dialog box sets things right but sometimes I resort to re-attaching the soundfont banks.
---Outside of Cakewalk, start the AudioHQ program. There's a virtual piano, and one named Soundfonts, start them both....The Creative soundfont program allows you to load a soundfont as a
bank or as an
instrument. Soundfonts should be loaded as
banks, because if you load it as an instrument, you can only use the first instrument in the bank--there's no way to use the other instruments. The Creative AudioHQ program is nice because it actually accurately displays the instruments in a bank by name. Cakewalk doesn't seem to be able to do that, it just shows numbers 0-127 and doesn't say if any number is supposed to be an instrument or not.
Check all 128 instruments: some drum kits are placed in instrument #10, and some people like to be smarty-pants and place instruments way up in the high numbers, instead of starting at zero.
