Ethan Winer explains why he chose the SoundBlaster Live card as the core for his new setup, and along the way he describes many useful tips for creating and editing samples in the popular SoundFont format.

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Striving for New Lows
By Ethan Winer
Contributing Editor
ProRec.com

SoundFonts

The SoundBlaster Live uses a sample format called SoundFonts. Several SoundFont banks are included when you buy the card, and hundreds more can be downloaded for free on the Internet (see the list of web sites below). Commercial SoundFont libraries are also available, and most cost much less than similar libraries for the "pro" format samplers.

The SB Live comes with 2 MB, 4 MB, and 8 MB General MIDI SoundFont banks. The 2 MB bank is installed by default but, depending on how much of your computer's main memory you are willing to allocate, you can instead load the 4 MB or 8 MB version. Each is progressively better because the instrument notes play for a longer time before looping. But the real action is in 32 MB SoundFonts, and dozens of them are available for download or purchase.

Since I write both pop and classical music, many of the 32 MB SoundFonts I found were of little use to me. I need good strings, oboes, clarinets, and so forth. Most of the large GM banks improve on the pop music instruments only, and contain the same cheesy classical instruments in the SB Live's original 8 MB bank. Indeed, many of the free sounds I found are lame, or merely contain minor variations on the stock sounds that already come with the SB Live. But there were some real gems among all the garbage, and I set out to create my own 32 MB GM SoundFont, based on the best samples I could find.

For less than $100 and about ten hours of download time, I ended up with a collection of sounds that are much better than all of my current hardware synths combined. (Plus I can always record a favorite sound from an existing synth and add it to my master bank.) In fact, I found so many great sounds--harp glisses, ethnic instruments, drum sets, even sound effects--that I created several additional SoundFont banks I can load as needed to access those additional patches. I also bought from the E-mu web site a SoundFont version of their Proteus/2 synthesizer. At only $29 this is a great value compared to what I paid for the hardware version just a few years ago!

Creating a custom SoundFont bank was a huge project that took more than three months to finish. Most of the work was done in Vienna, the SoundFont editor Creative Labs offers for free in the LiveWare Downloads area of their web site. When samples needed to be edited or relooped I used Sound Forge 4.5. But the real effort was auditioning the hundreds of electric basses, clarinets, harps--you name it--and deciding which were best and thus deserved to go in my master file. Along the way I learned a lot about building and editing SoundFonts and looping samples, and that is covered in Part 2 of this article, linked below.

I have not yet found a grand piano SoundFont as good as my Yamaha PFp-100. The stereo Grand Piano in Fluid is the best I have come across so far, and it's noticeably better than the piano patches in most hardware synthesizers. But for now, when I write a tune where the piano is prominent and I need the highest quality possible, I'll simply record my PFp-100 as an audio track.

Web sites that offer SoundFonts for free downloading
Hammer Sound
Fluid
Personal Copy
Planet AWE
SF Upload
The Sound Site
Up Metal! Studio

Many of the web sites that offer SoundFont files for downloading use SFPack and/or SFArk. These ZIP-like programs are designed specifically for compressing SF2 files to make them download faster. All of the sites that use these utilities also have links to download them.

Hammer Sound is run by Thomas Hammer, and this is a great site with tons of SF2 files. All of the files are organized by category, and many of the sounds are rated by previous downloaders.

Fluid is a work in progress by Frank Wen, and the site has only the 35 MB Fluid.sf2 file. But this is a very good collection of instruments and it's well worth the download time.

The Personal Copy site is not a huge collection, but according to "JimR," the site's host, "If a SoundFont isn't outstanding, I don't post it."

PlanetAWE offers only a few original files, but it has links to many other free and commercial SoundFont sites.

SFUpload is run by Kyosuke Takahashi, and contains mostly pop instruments as well as some complete drum loops.

The Sound Site is the most comprehensive of all the SoundFont sites I have found. There are several gigabytes of SF2 files you can download for free, and they also offer every file on the site on a four-CD set for $39 postpaid.

The UpMetal! site contains mostly drum files, but there are a few organs and pianos too.

Next: Creating, Editing, and Using SoundFonts

 

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