Analoguesque - Soundfont Tutorial

Sound Designs

Creating Presets

The Preset Section is broken down into two areas : The Melodic Pool, and the Percussive Pool. These are essentially identical in the way they work, but MIDI sees them differently. For the sake of simplicity, view them as follows:

The Melodic Pool can be accessed from all MIDI channels, except MIDI channel 10. It usually contains melodic instruments, but is not restricted to these.
The Percussive Pool can be accessed only from MIDI channel 10, and usually contains percussive instruments, like drums. It is not restricted to percussive sounds, however.

The process of creating a preset in the Melodic or Percussive Pool is not worth exploring too deeply because it follows the same process used in the creation of an Instrument in the Instrument Pool, as we saw in the section on creating Instruments. If you follow the process outlined there and apply the same actions to Melodic Pool as you did to Instrument Pool, you will be able to import Instruments into a New Melodic Preset, as opposed to importing Samples into a New Instrument.

The only real difference is in the popup box which appears when you right-click on the Melodic Pool, which is shown in figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1

As you can see from Figure 6.1, we have called the preset Sweepsynth, and clicking on OK will bring up a list of the available instruments (from the Instrument Pool) to choose from. These are obviously the instruments you created earlier. Choose those you would like to include in the preset (i.e. layering instruments as opposed to layering samples), and click OK. We now have a single preset (called Sweepsynth) which can be accessed from a MIDI sequencer by choosing patch # 0 (or 1, depending on whether or not your sequencer references patches from 0-127 or 1-128). In Figure 6.1, the Preset Number = 0 actually tells us which patch number this refers to in the sequencer.

For our purposes, always select Bank Number 0 (as in Figure 6.1). Then all you need do in your sequencer is select Bank 0, and cycle through all the presets as described by the Preset Number in figure 6.1.

That's about all there is to it, except to say that once you have inserted and layered instruments within your Melodic Pool, you can edit them in the same way as you did samples in the Instrument Pool. Please refer to the section on Instruments for a complete rundown on how to do this, but substitute Instruments and Melodic Pool for Samples and Instrument Pool, respectively.

That's it! You've completed the tutorial and should be ready to tackle some synth-programming of your own. To make your life easier, download the Tutorial SoundFont^® Bank file, which contains the example created in this tutorial. It should give you some hands-on experience, and you will learn a lot simply by adjusting different parameters within the SoundFont^® Bank. Good luck, and happy programming ...

The Analoguesque Team.

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