The Roland Corporation created a superset of GM Level 1 called GS. General MIDI Level 1 Percussion Key Map (with Key # and Pitch (60=middle C) While many current instruments also have additional sounds above or below the range show here, and may even have additional "kits" with variations of these sounds, only these sounds are supported by General MIDI Level 1 devices. GM-compatible instruments must have the sounds on the keys shown here. On MIDI Channel 10, each MIDI Note number ("Key#") corresponds to a different drum sound, as shown below.
General MIDI Level 1 Instrument Patch Map with Families In addition, percussion maps (what percussion instrument sounded on what key#) were standardized, so if your instrument has several GM drum kits they will be mapped as indicated below on the GM Percussion Keymap link. They need to have a minimum of 24 voices, 16 MIDI channels of variable polyphony, percussion assigned to MIDI channel 10, a minimum of 128 programs (using the Program Change Data Byte 0-127 values) and have support for controllers #1,7,10, 64, 121 and 123, velocity, channel pressure and pitch bend (set to +/- 2 semitones). In addition, GM-compliant keyboards or sound cards (or now plug-ins) have to meet certain other standards as well. Certain programs of either General MIDI instruments or computer sound cards synthesizers would contain specific instrumental or sound effects patches. which they called called General MIDI System Level 1 (or just General MIDI or GM). So in 1991 a standard was adopted by the MIDI Manufactures Association (MMA) and the Japan MIDI Standards Cmte. The fact that users could share Standard MIDI files did not guarantee that those files would be played back with the same sort of timbres they were made with, either by instruments or computers reading web pages. Metadata embedded in a standard MIDI file include such things as track names, track General MIDI instrument, tempo change, key signatures, lyrics (which allow many Karaoke machines to read and display them-seriously!), and even system exclusive data.
Each event is preceded by a delta time value, which uses two bytes (14-bit precision).
Also, tens of thousands of playable or downloadable SMF performances are available from sites like Classical Archives. With the ability to embed and play sequences directly on computer sound cards, standard MIDI files have become commonplace items in web page authoring (particularly the online greeting card market). Today, for example, a composer may save a Standard MIDI File created by a notation program and open it in a MIDI sequencing program, which will understand the various parameters of the file, such as track names, tempo changes, etc.
The Roland Sound Canvas (SC-88VL) is a 1U half rack (aftertouch and velocity sensitive), 64 voice (multimbral), GS/GM compatible digital synthesizer (editing via MIDI only), featuring an oscillator, a resonant low-pass filter, an ADR envelope, vibrato (with delay), portamento, reverb/chorus/delay, 2-band EQ, 654 presets, 24 drum sets, stereo mix inputs, PC/Mac interface, and MIDI.Created in 1988 due to an explosion of different types of MIDI software, a standard, transportable file format for saving MIDI sequences and opening them with other programs was adopted. Puts the SC-88 back into a half rack configuration by eliminating the user editable program memory (similar to SC-88ST).Īrchitecture Class: Rompler.