Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

I agree. XG sounds great with all the little "extras" like fret sounds and such, but of course it sounds bad if you are not using the correct XG voice with those "extras" mapped to the correct velocity layer or split or wherever they put them.

I always thought that should be part of GM, maybe GM3 - all the manufactures could agree on some voice patches that have the same velocity layers and determine which low or high octave will have all those "extras". Even better yet, have post-processing of a midi track and it would figure out where to put those "extras". You could not do it live, but again post-processing that would do something like "if nylon guitar and the difference between 2 notes would be farther than 3 frets, then add fret sound between those 2 notes", or "if 3 notes together and at end of measure, then strum them out and use the hard down-strum sounding layer", and if it was a standard like GM3, then the fret sound would always be in the top most octave, or 4th layer at velocity 127, or whatever, so it would always sound right as long as you had a GM3 compliant voice patch.

--- In xl7@yahoogroups.com, Bruno <brunorc@...> wrote:
>
> 2012/5/21 intrepidpete <peteflagg@...>:
> > The Perfect Piano in that ZR card is great, but the GM bank is blah. Why do GM banks always sound so bad? I mean the ZR card has nice piano, brass, string, and guitar waveforms, so why not use those for the GM bank so it would sound good?
> 
> I think that the strategy for GM/XG banks is (was?) in most cases to
> make a bunch of mediocre sound, but in a way they would always sound
> good when mixed together in various combinations. It's like with
> software - portability usually comes for a price of optimization.
> 
> The XG was an interesting case, there was a vivid community built
> around it, mostly out of Yamaha MU50/90R and CS1x users. It produced a
> heap of interesting tricks & SysEx incantations, trying to squeeze
> some more serious sounds out of those boards. I recall a shock when I
> brought my P2K home, and started tweaking my existing pieces to use
> the E-mu sounds. Of course the XG standard was gone, but the sonic
> reward was great...
> 
> Bruno
>