Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoPlp3Nfjok

> That is very, very smooth. Really atmospheric too. And with the little 
> background details, this one almost sounds professional-quality.

  Incidentally, that's the only song I made 100% with a midi keyboard,
with only extremely small amount of post-editing to fix/remove the most
obvious errors. (All the other songs were made almost purely with the
midi sequencer software itself, iow. with the mouse and PC keyboard.)

  For this reason there's no fixed tempo. It's basically "tempoless".
It's also mostly unrehearsed and hence improvised (iow. each channel
contains what I played for the first time, without restarting; I did try
a bit to find some tune beforehand, but after a while I just started
recording.) I first recorded the main melody (the synth sound, with
both the melody and the accompaniment played at the same time) on one
sitting. Then I added the choir sound on top of that (also in one go),
and then the various other random sounds (one recording session per type
of sound).

  So it's basically an improv.

> I'm surprised you managed to get such impressive sound quality from a 
> MIDI file. Usually that means using the default software renderer, which 
> (depending on which version of Windows you have) sounds abysmal. I've 
> heard toy pianos that sound better than that thing!

  Well, I used a SoundBlaster AWE32 with a partially custom soundfont as
my soundcard back then. Not a pro-quality soundcard, but good enough for
my purposes. (The card supports recording to a raw WAV file the raw PCM
data that the soundcard produces, so there isn't any need to make a
quality-losing useless digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion.)

  Curiously, the only PC hardware that I have that has gone backwards in
quality is precisely in the sound department. My current PC is unable to
produce these sounds from the midi files on hardware (because I can't put
the AWE32 in this PC, as it has no ISA port.)

  Of course via software it would be possible to produce even better-quality
sounds.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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