When General MIDI standard sounds became widespread in early-mid 90s I already wet my feet with synthesizers, samplers and the Amiga .MOD scene, so I was eager to try this new format and its standard library of sounds, but was surprised how absolutely awful they sounded compared to pretty much everything I used, cheap keyboards included. No way I would swap any of my cheap synthesizers with a MT32 or any similar expander. I may have a very unpopular opinion, but hated those sounds since day one, and still hate them. The demos linked sound just terrible to my ears; you can't make a general purpose sound and expect it to fit any song in any genre as much as you can't have a single type of cheese and expect it to be good in all meals. I completely understand the reason why they existed, but no, I don't feel any nostalgia.
It's a common misconception that GM has to sound bad. Consumer GM units used the smallest sound ROMs they could get away with, lower quality DACs, etc. But you could fire up GM on your Kurzweil K2000, your Quadrasynth, your Roland, or Yamaha professional level synthesizers and workstations and the same GM programs would sound amazing.
For less than a higher end Sound Canvas, you can get a real professional synth with a much bigger and better sound ROM, better DACs, better effects, etc.
My sister's a musician and when I bought the adapter to hook her keyboard-synth to my Sound Blaster and fired up Wing Commander II, I was blown away by the sound track. It didn't hurt that the speakers on the keyboard were far better than the 5W speakers that I originally got with my Sound Blaster 2.0
The problem you get replacing the instrument sounds with those from a better synth is they will sound different and often out of balance (certain instruments too quiet or loud or the timbre not fitting in). I believe there were a few projects trying to create a "sound font" to give optimal MIDI sound to early 90s DOS games.
Yes, that’s a problem. Working from the other direction… one of the big things about General MIDI is that if you want to write a song, you know which sounds are available so you can compose a GM track and then take it to some nicer gear and fine-tune it there. Maybe you write your track on a MT-32 or SC-88 at home, and then bring the MIDI file into a studio where they’ve got a JV-1080. Your music won’t be balanced, but it will at least be intelligible, with the correct instruments playing in the correct octave.
Game composers usually composed their music on a MIDI workstation keyboard, sometimes only preparing a final mix on a Sound Canvas (or GUS etc). So it may be that using a higher end synthesizer is closer to the way the developer intended the music to be.
I don't think this is a huge problem though, waveforms on sound ROMs are normalized so their peak loudness is as loud as she goes, no matter what the synthesizer. Even Sound Canvas models have different sound ROMs over time, and Gravis (and later, Creative et al) shipped enhanced GM sound fonts as well. I just like instruments to sound more authentic. I understand though if people want that Roland Sound Canvas sound too, or MT32 even. MT32 still can't be properly emulated. I own the real deal and it sounds much better than MUNT. Hats off to the MUNT team but like most (all?) software emulations of hardware synthesizers, something is missing.
If you need some real world examples, here is a recording of "One Stop" from a few different professional synthesizers (Roland JV-1080, XV-5080, INTEGRA-7, and KORG X5DR) to get an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7wRCvWLm2o
General Midi specified a set of instruments and standard program values to select them. For example 0 (or one depending on where you start counting) is will be a piano. Just as pianos vary in timbre, so can the instruments among various GM devices.
Agreed, the MT32 sounded very bad, but it inspired a scene of MIDI enthusiasts and companies making countless MIDI song files for popular and classical music that travelled via floppy discs and bulletin board systems. And the MT32 was kind of GM before GM - and its drum note assignments can still be found in the bones of some of the most recent and ambitious beat making plugins.
So I value the MT32 as an historic technology culture enabler, rather than as a sonic treasure.
That being said, I should run mine through my guitar pedalboard and see if it can be made to sound cool. :-)
I think things changed a bit with MIDI with the introduction of Soundfonts, and even more with dedicated MIDI sound cards.
I bought a Roland SCC-1 [1], and fell in love with MIDI. It was basically a CM-300 in a PCI card. I could program music that sounded like it was coming from a Roland keyboard. Such good memories.
But like you, I also was not a fan of FM produced MIDI, and that was only exacerbated by the SCC-1.
Soundfonts made it possible for games like FF7 to sound identical to the PS1, which was miles ahead of FM MIDI.
From my perspective it was exactly the opposite. FM synths were great because they sounded like synths. Some of the most memorable game soundtracks of the era were that precisely because they had such a characteristic sound to them. When high-quality sampled sounds became the norm, there was nothing unique about game music any more, it just sounded like any other soundtrack. Might as well just play a CD at that point.
The MT-32, from what I understand, was based on the D-50 series, which means in theory it should have had access to unique patches like DigitalNativeDance. The problem with General MIDI is that it limited patches to the lowest common denominator, so even if a ROMpler had the potential to make interesting sounds, composers would stick to the generic ones for compatibility. I think it's no surprise the Sound Blaster (with CD-ROM interface) won over General MIDI in the end, because that way composers could record on professional equipment and everyone would hear it the same. It's too bad that it also ushered in the era of "game music" just being orchestral scores, pop music etc.
There's a lot from the D-50 that's missing on an MT-32, like 50% of the ROM capacity, and all of the filters and effects.
And on top of that, DigitalNativeDance is an outlier. It was (for its day) such a profligate use of ROM that it's not even representative of what a D-50 could do, in general.
Not that this contradicts your main point about GM constraining the choice of sounds.
I think the move to 'plain' digital audio has been liberating. It still is possible to create a game soundtrack on an FM synthesizer, so there's nothing lost except the headaches of incompatible sound card implementations.
If a game really needs to have a 'true' synthesizer it's easy enough to make use of a good software emulation now.
However, FM synth on PC sound cards, IMO, sounded pretty awful. I would prefer 8-bit NES synth over that of PC synth. E.g. while I do have some nostalgia from the Canon.mid file, I still thought it sounded relatively bad, compared to NES or SNES voices.
I felt the same about the Genesis, which I think used similar synth to older PC FM synth. I always felt that the SNES voices (or even NES 8-bit) sounded far better compared to the Genesis.
Ironically, the SNES's SPC unit was essentially a very resource constrained ROMpler. While it was capable of synthesis like the NES (in fact, many early third party SNES titles used this, as devs migrating to the platform were more familiar with making music in this style), the ability to load samples and play them back is why so many folks hail it as the console with superior sound of its generation. The YM-2612 in the Genesis did indeed enable composers to create some legendary soundtracks of their own (Anyone who doesn't know Yuzo Koshiro's work for example might enjoy Charles Cornell's dive into the OST of Streets of Rage [1]), the best OSTs for the console were in styles that lent themselves to embrace the sound of the chip, where the SNES, leveraging the ROMpler model, allowed it to make rich music across many more genres.
Speaking of ROMplers and the SNES, these inexpensive ROMplers from Roland and Korg were what much of the music of these consoles were made on, with many of the SNES soundfonts bing made up of highly truncated versions of the ROMpler's samples. The sound of second, third, and fourth generation Final Fantasy games as composed by Nobuo Uematsu heavily used the Roland SoundCanvas SC-55, with the final title he was lead composer on, Final Fantasy 10, essentially using fully rendered tracks using the platform, with then-modern arrangement and production techniques instead of the soundfont + tracker-style music programming used on the SNES and PS1 titles (the PS1's SPU is essentially a souped up SPC700, hearkening back to its roots as the SNES CD, allowing developers to make music in much the same way, albeit with higher resolution samples, more channels, and more effects).
To your point though, the the Genesis' YM-2612, in Yamaha's OPN family was a similar chip to the Yamaha OPL-family chips used by the SoundBlaster platform, albeit it featured complex FM operators that wouldn't be seen on SoundBlaster cards until the versions with "OPL 3" chips became prevalent, which was inconsistent on the SB16 family.
> FM synth on PC sound cards, IMO, sounded pretty awful.
Only when used as a 'stand in' for a General MIDI sound palette. Some MS-DOS games programmed the OPL-2/3 FM chips directly, making more effective use of the synthesis capabilities. For instance the soundtrack for the MS-DOS version of the first Dune game by Cryo, which still sounds beautiful.
Compared to how many people, in many countries, use cheese, this sounds like an audiophile complaint.
Sure, yes, for tens or hundreds of millions of people, cheese is just cheese and a medium cheddar type cheese is interchangeable with any other in any recipe.
Similarly massive world-famous tracks, and entire music genres, have been built upon the built-in preprogrammed rhythm tracks of a few cheap 1970s Japanese home keyboards. Whole types of music where nobody involved can read notation, or play a chord, or possibly play an instrument at all.
In the light of this, I found this comment elitist and snooty and patronising in the extreme, TBH.
Of course you can make good music around super limited basic sound samples. To deny this is to deny arguably a double-digit percentage of all popular music since the 1960s or '70s.
Isn't General MIDI simply the mapping of certain instruments to certain numeric IDs? It doesn't dictate the actual sounds or samples that are used, does it?
Given that, why would it sound worse than any other means of triggering the same instruments?
Lots of smaller or portable synthesizers use a 3,5mm TRS connector for MIDI. It's badly standardised though: there are different wirings depending on the manufacturer.
In 1996 Yamaha was all about TwinVQ (which was far better than mp3 at low bitrates) anyway, so it'd have been that rather than mp3, had they gone that route.
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