Now Playing. "Drawing a Sexy Fox" by T1na Badgraph1csghost
It had been my intent to do this on the 4th, but as I carried on writing, it seemed less and less relevant until it was completely forgotten.
But, yes. The cover of The Wellerman Song on "Kent State, sea chanteys, and the Fairlight CMI" was done entirely with my new Fairlight CMI Series IIx soundfont. Someone on the Internet Archive had uploaded all 32 of the CMI IIx's factory preset disks, which I set about making into a soundfont. At this stage, I've finished with all 25 of the melodic samples and have only the animals, effects, machines, and waveform primitives to do now. I'll also be releasing a special "Disk 99", full of Fairlight-style samples of my own creation, including some of my own voice. None of the Disk 99 samples occur in the song above because I figured you'd be more interested in hearing the Fairlight on its own. It's the workhorse of multi-platinum 1980s pro audio production and now, it's free. No Arturia, no iOS App.
I'm also working on some other soundfont projects at the moment. Tentatively called "Platinum1980", this one will contain all the most overused sounds from the 1980s in one place, from Fairlight's SARARR to Roland's D.NativeDance. I'm having problems making the drumkits compatible with sforzando, which is a bit of a problem, seeing as how I also want to add several of the drum machines, including the Linn LM-1 (the real one, not that Best Service Gigapack shite), Oberheim DMX, and several implementations of Fairlight CMI drum samples.
The other project is an HQ General MIDI canvas I'm tentatively calling Project: Matisse. I'm trying to get someone onboard with a toy piano that has such great sound, it blows pro audio producers out of the water; and Matisse will be the default soundfont. Of course, until I can get that particular project off the ground, it will also serve as a broadcast-quality soundfont for composers who're just starting out. One of the problems that sforzando in particular seems to have is that it doesn't understand what Polyphone calls "modulators". Settings that modify the character of a sound based upon certain predefined MIDI events, such as aftertouch, velocity, and foot controllers other than sostenuto pedals. The obvious way around this would be to use sounds that don't use them, which would increase the filesize, especially with pianos, but it's better than busting your hump on modulators just for sforzando to throw them out and go "duhhh, I'unno."
An aside—if anyone on Neocities knows any soundfont players that are better at SF2 than sforzando, please let me know. Bonus points if it's free.
--9 May 2024--