Two MIDI Questions

[Will_Bender]

Hello Everyone,

So I have figured out now how to export an entire playlist of patterns to MIDI... I can open up the midi file in a notation editor, and all is well... I can also open up a midi player, and I can hear music coming out...

Now for the problem...

The first part is... While the file makes sound - the voices are wrong for some reason, or even non-existent... In FLS, I reset the voices to play as strings, but when I open them up in Microsoft Media Player - they are playing as horns... when I open them up in MuseScore, while the staves of music show up, they arent playing at all... so my first question is... what kind of monkey business is going on with the instrumentation?

The second part is... well, it has to do with the dynamics of the voices... I have a touch sensitive controller, and notes I played in softly aren't evenly matched (volumewise) against notes I played when I pounded the keys... Additionally, the volumes overall are all pretty low... So the second question is - how to bring everything up to a decent level, and then see if there is a way of evening it out...

Any help here is much appreciated... I almost have this down!

Thank you very much!

WB

 

[bandcoach]

your first problem is related to the program change number that fl exports (as far as I can work out it does not export a specific program number)

so you may want to investigate what the GM program numbers are for each instrument/sound set and insert these inside of musescore. Other GM data information

M(edia)$(layer) will auto assign voices if it does not find program info, though it is meant to only assign the piano sound to all channels except channel 10 (the GMStandard drum channel)

Your velocity issues are more to do with individual playback units as much as they are to do with your keyboards initial input (played) values - if your keyboard has any sort of velocity mapping on it, it may impede your ability to provide fine gradation of velocity/loudness/dynamics.

The overall loudness is also affected by two of the MIDI ContinuousControllers: CC7 - Volume, and CC11 Expression. CC7 sets the maximum playback volume allowed. CC11 allows you to then provide a gradation in volume related to the maximum level.

For example
Set CC7 to 127. now set CC11 to 64 - the effect is that the perceived volume will be as if CC7 were set to 64 (the halfway value). Increase the value of CC11 to increase volume, much the same way you would create a crescendo. Decrease the value of CC11 to create a decrescendo.

Use velocity to map instantaneous dynamic level or simply set it to 127 regardless of overall volume and use the CC11 to control perceived dynamic level - I do not recommend this as velocity is used in some sound sets to change the timbre created; i.e. overtone/harmonic/partial generation is based on velocity received

 

[krushing]

Just to put it a bit simpler than what bc said - MIDI simply doesn't really have any information in it on what kind of sound it's supposed to make - it's basically just the notes and the controller data. General MIDI (GM) is more or less a subset of the broader regular MIDI spec, which simply assigns a standard set of instruments to specific program numbers, so anything GM-compatible should usually play back with the same instrument (but this doesn't mean it'll use the same samples).