Re: MIDI instrument for oboe d'amore

[Jacques Menu]

Thanks Lukas and Aaron for your help.

In fact, my use case is merely to listen to the MIDI file from within 
Frescobaldi, to ear-proof the score. I don’t have any MIDI equipment, and organ 
sound is fine for that purpose.

I got the surprise that transposing a voice for the oboe d’amore in A, in 
Lully’s « Dormez beaux yeux » for the needs of our oboes band, lead to quite 
modern music being heard...

What would best suit my need is a way to counter-balance the effect of 
\transpose in the \midi block. This way, one would get both the printed score 
and the MIDI pitches alright, even for instruments unknown to standard MIDI.

Can that be done?

JM

> Le 29 avr. 2019 à 20:53, Aaron Hill <address@hidden> a écrit :
> 
> On 2019-04-29 9:28 am, Jacques Menu wrote:
>> Hello,
>> I find oboe and french horn, but no oboe d’amore in A.6 MIDI instruments.
>> Which other setting can I use for this instrument in A?
> 
> General MIDI does not define such an instrument in the standard, and neither 
> did GS nor XG.  In fact, the reed section of GM Level 2 has no extended 
> patches at all.  (GS and XG do have variations like the "bass clarinet" and 
> some alternate saxophone patches.)
> 
> While it would not be standards-compliant, you could certainly select an 
> alternate bank for the oboe patch with the intention that it means an oboe 
> d'amore.  For your own usage, it would require you to manually configure your 
> synth to load a suitable sound for the instrument.  For other folks using 
> your MIDI file, their synths should fall back using a standard oboe patch 
> which might work, except for lower notes that could be outside the playable 
> range.
> 
> From what I understand, an oboe d'amore has a timbre between the normal oboe 
> and the cor anglais.  What I would do in my virtual instrument software is 
> load up an oboe patch but then apply some EQ to soften the sound a bit so it 
> is not quite as assertive.  For the fact that the playable range is lower, I 
> might also need to mix in a little of the English horn patch to fill out the 
> lower notes, which will require blending to balance the timbre.  But it must 
> be noted that this work is beyond the scope of MIDI.
> 
>> There’s no clarinet in A either.
> 
> For better or worse, a "clarinet in A" is simply a clarinet as far as General 
> MIDI is concerned.  In MIDI you typically specify the pitch you want played, 
> not the note that is written that may sound higher or lower depending on the 
> instrument.  As such, MIDI note 60 would most often refer to the 
> equal-tempered middle C whose fundamental is approximately 261.63 Hz, and one 
> should expect that any GM-compliant synth to render the pitch properly.  That 
> said, I have encountered some sound libraries that intentionally transpose 
> samples from their nominal pitches; and that requires manually transposing a 
> MIDI track to compensate.  I dislike this practice as it is not very portable.
> 
> 
> -- Aaron Hill
> 
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