Are General MIDI synthesizers as good as they are going to get?

Related link: http://www.http://www.fatman.com/fatlabs.htm

BeigeBat, who should be admired for, if nothing else, getting away with that name, wrote:

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Whither General MIDI?
2005-08-09 18:33:59 BeigeBat

Or is that wither, General MIDI? At one point, you led a crusade (http://www.fatman.com/fatlabs.htm) to improve General MIDI synthesizers. Are they now as good as they’re going to get? How are composers of interactive music using GM now? Or MIDI in general?

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Are General MIDI synthesizers as good as they are going to get?

I think you'll be surprised to find that the concept of GM is still very much alive and being supported by the cutting-edge synthesizers. The tones and libraries are improving as fast as any tones and libraries anywhere. Here's a link to a colossal GM set called...Colossus

Colossus GM-Compatible Sound Library

So, the tones are FANTASTIC.

Now then. Regarding the stuff that Fat Labs concerned itself with, the compatibility aspect of GM, I don't think things are going to improve. They're pretty good, but they are not really splendid, and certainly not up to the level of quality that will be demanded by people who use the Colossus library or anything like it.

General MIDI was never a standard. It was merely a set of suggested practices, and when it first was used, the attack times and volumes of the individual instruments varied so much from one device to another that GM files could not be used from machine to machine with any kind of dependable, musical results. The Catch-22 was that in order to define volume levels, one would have to identify a soundset to use as a standard, and that was politically impossible in the competitive environment of Musical Instrument manufacture. MI companies pride themselves on their unique sounds, and any comparison, even in volume, with a competitor's tones was frowned upon. In other words, General MIDI was not general when it came out, nor was it likely to become so.

I swear to you, I had no idea that this was the case when I created the first GM soundtrack for a game, The 7th Guest. There was only one GM device in existence...how could I know? When I finally realized the issue, I felt responsible for the fact that a lot of people would hear my soundtrack and expect finished work, but get merely a rough mix. So, along with Team Fat, I started Fat Labs, a company that would provide a compatibility testing service to manufacturers of GM devices. For a while, it was impossible to sell a GM chip to a Korean sound card manufacturer if it didn't have the "Fat Seal."

Whee! Nice ego trip, no money. I never really had a good head for extortion.

After years of doing Fat Labs tests (details can be found here ) with many major clients, we got enough GM sets close enough to compatibility that I think a certain momentum grew around using the Roland Sound Canvas sound set as a standard for attack times and perceived volumes of instruments. After much friction, Mark Miller, my good friend and then chairman of the MIDI Manufacturers Association, reluctantly mumbled at a meeting something like "OK, George, the Sound Canvas is the standard." I was never able to get him to make a formal statement to me, but perhaps one exists somewhere in the MMA archives.

So, I would say that GM is still not a standard. To call it such would be an insult to the MIDI Manufacturers Association. The MMA, the standards organization that is officialy custodian of MIDI, is very serious and thorough about their standards. When they say that something is a standard, like MIDI, it by-God is a standard, and it works every time. MIDI (not GM) is particularly wonderful in this way.

Not being a true standard, though, I will say that GM is a very handy tool. In other words, it might be convenient for me to write a tune on a Sound Canvas and pass it over as a GM file to Team Fat's orchestrator/composer Dave Govett to tweak in Colossus. BUT it is important that we tweak. We cannot lean too heavily on depending on GM files to sound satisfactory when composed on one GM device and then translated to another.

I hope this answers the first part of your question. I will address the rest of your question in a separate entry.

Bring it ON!