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Comment by ElectricBoogie | Hacker News Reader

It's a common misconception that GM has to sound bad. Consumer GM units used the smallest sound ROMs they could get away with, lower quality DACs, etc. But you could fire up GM on your Kurzweil K2000, your Quadrasynth, your Roland, or Yamaha professional level synthesizers and workstations and the same GM programs would sound amazing.

For less than a higher end Sound Canvas, you can get a real professional synth with a much bigger and better sound ROM, better DACs, better effects, etc.

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My sister's a musician and when I bought the adapter to hook her keyboard-synth to my Sound Blaster and fired up Wing Commander II, I was blown away by the sound track. It didn't hurt that the speakers on the keyboard were far better than the 5W speakers that I originally got with my Sound Blaster 2.0

The problem you get replacing the instrument sounds with those from a better synth is they will sound different and often out of balance (certain instruments too quiet or loud or the timbre not fitting in). I believe there were a few projects trying to create a "sound font" to give optimal MIDI sound to early 90s DOS games.

Yes, that’s a problem. Working from the other direction… one of the big things about General MIDI is that if you want to write a song, you know which sounds are available so you can compose a GM track and then take it to some nicer gear and fine-tune it there. Maybe you write your track on a MT-32 or SC-88 at home, and then bring the MIDI file into a studio where they’ve got a JV-1080. Your music won’t be balanced, but it will at least be intelligible, with the correct instruments playing in the correct octave.

Game composers usually composed their music on a MIDI workstation keyboard, sometimes only preparing a final mix on a Sound Canvas (or GUS etc). So it may be that using a higher end synthesizer is closer to the way the developer intended the music to be.

I don't think this is a huge problem though, waveforms on sound ROMs are normalized so their peak loudness is as loud as she goes, no matter what the synthesizer. Even Sound Canvas models have different sound ROMs over time, and Gravis (and later, Creative et al) shipped enhanced GM sound fonts as well. I just like instruments to sound more authentic. I understand though if people want that Roland Sound Canvas sound too, or MT32 even. MT32 still can't be properly emulated. I own the real deal and it sounds much better than MUNT. Hats off to the MUNT team but like most (all?) software emulations of hardware synthesizers, something is missing.

Not just "could"; e.g., Yamaha's latest workstations, with gigabytes of samples, still support General MIDI[1].

[1] https://usa.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/7/2172427...

If you need some real world examples, here is a recording of "One Stop" from a few different professional synthesizers (Roland JV-1080, XV-5080, INTEGRA-7, and KORG X5DR) to get an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7wRCvWLm2o

Right.

General Midi specified a set of instruments and standard program values to select them. For example 0 (or one depending on where you start counting) is will be a piano. Just as pianos vary in timbre, so can the instruments among various GM devices.

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