About the Soundfonts

WHAT ARE SOUNDFONTS?

The SoundFont technology, developed by Creative Technology Ltd. and E-mu Systems®, Inc., (SoundFont is a registered Trade Mark of Creative Technology Ltd.), is used by many soundcards and software synthesizers to provide instrument sounds for MIDI music playback or MIDI sequencing. It allows one to improve tremendously over the sounds normally available with GM (General Midi).

Samplesmith G1 SoundFonts, supplied in .SF2 format, are quite large, so make sure you can run them before you purchase. The smaller one is 72,823 KB, while the larger one is 104,311 KB. None of the samples are looped, and some of them run over 3MB for an individual stereo sample, so there isn't much room to make it smaller without reducing the quality.

The sample set in the large font includes all natural (non-accidental) notes in first position, including open and fingered samples of E1, A1, D2, G2, B2, and E3 and then up the 1st string to C5 (20th fret). I do have to admit that I'm not in love with it over about B3, though. Most notes are mapped for their original pitch and one semitone higher, excepting B's and E's of course, and with the additional exception of B1, E2, and A2 which are mapped one semitone lower and one higher in order to accommodate single note mapping of all the open string pitches.

In the small font I've kept the open string pitches as above, but used 1 sample to cover each string from the first to the 4th fret on each string. On the first string, I've mapped the A3 sample from A3 to B3 and the C4 sample from C4 to C5.

If you open the font in Vienna, you'll see that the filenames read like this:

A#1S6P1LR-NthWdOM60.4816.wav,

which reads as A#1, 6th string, Position 1, Long Ring, Northwood model OM60, downsampled to 48kHz/16bit. The 'Position 1' part is really redundant and actually incorrect, in this example. I hadn't thought this part through at the time they were recorded and named, so I'm stuck with it for now.

The softer attack samples were derived from the Long Rings by editing and are simply named something like

A_4S1Short.wav -(A4 string 1).

The muted samples are named in a similar manner to the long rings but with Mt in the name instead of LR.

There are 4 presets in the soundfont -2 sets of long rings, 1 set of muted notes and the V-pos preset which uses samples in 5th position, rather than 1st. The long rings are velocity switched between long and short samples, where the shorter samples have been edited to remove the initial hard attack from the long samples. The 2 long presets use the same sample set. The only difference is that the 'Open' preset defaults to have open string versions of A1 D2 G2 B2 and E3 played when called by their respective midi key numbers, whereas the Fing(ered) preset defaults to playing these notes fingered on the next lowest string. In either preset the option exists to call the alternate open or fingered version of these notes by calling the same note name an octave below the range of the guitar.

In the 'Open' preset:

In the 'Fing' preset:

In the muted sampleset, I only sampled the E1 and A1 with open strings. Therefore, the only difference between these 2 presets is in the mapping of the A1.

In the 'Open Muted' preset:

In the 'Fing Muted' preset:

In ALL presets:
The E1 sample is mapped to include D1, D#1 and E1

In the V Pos preset the samples used were the long rings from the fifth fret up to the ninth for the lower 5 strings. Again' I'll mention that the position field in the sample names wasn't used. You can differentiate these samples by the pitch and string names.

On the download page, you'll find a couple of pdf's which show the mapping in an easier format, and also a list of all the samples files I that I have on hand for this instrument.

Just a note here regarding my paranthetical remark "where it should be" above. It seems to escape many people that the guitar is actually a transposing instrument. While it is a 'C' instrument, it is not a concert pitch instrument because the transposition required for notation is 8va, or 1 octave up from where it actually sounds, so a C on the guitar is indeed a C concert (leading to the confusion), but it's not the C it appears to be in guitar notation. . Middle C (C4) in notation (midi key 60) played on the guitar will sound as C3 (midi key 48). The mapping of this soundfont is absolute (with the exceptions listed above). I hope this will make things a bit simpler for keyboardists. What you see is what you get.

If you're working on a strumming style of piece, I'd suggest setting the soundfont player up with the long rings preset on channels 1 -12 so you can separate individual strings and upstrokes from down strokes. You would then have 4 channels left for other uses if needs be.

For finger-picking stuff, I find it works well to use the Long Rings preset for Channels 1 to 6 and the Muted preset for channels 7 to 12, which leaves 4 more for V-pos use.

I explain these in the demo editing articles and I encourage you to at least browse through them. Any good sound font is still going to sound disappointing if it's being fed machine gun midi, with all the velocities the same, everything on the grid and no expressive elements. It's just like a fine instrument with a poor player.

The samples were recorded in stereo on a Northwood OM-60 guitar, hand-built by John McQuarrie. This is a wonderful instrument with mahogany back and sides and spruce top, and a very slim neck (seems a bit Gibson-ish to me) which is just perfect for players like me who spend much of their playing time on electric. It is a bit bright, as you would expect from mahogany, so it does cut well in a group setting, but for solo work with high notes I find it a bit brittle, which is the basis of my reservations about the samples above B3 or so.