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First post, by Mike

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I have a Casio piano that is a General MIDI, and has 2 AT ports on the back of the piano. I'm wondering what is the nessesary materials I would need to connect the piano to my PC, so I can get wavetable sound.

Reply 2 of 8, by Mike

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I have the PC DOS 6.3 OS, it is not compatible with USB, but I found the serial and 5-pin DIN MIDI cable that I need, I would like to know if the serial part of the cable should be connected to a Sound Blaster 16 or not, you know how the ISA SB16's have a joystick port, well, I think the MIDI cable goes there, I am not sure at all...

Reply 3 of 8, by HunterZ

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Yeah SB16 is the best card for a DOS computer if you want to hook a MIDI keyboard to it. What you want is a gameport-to-MIDI cable or adapter. They might be hard to find these days though (maybe eBay has some?)

Also, the reason I say SB16 is good is because you'll then be able to play game MIDI on your keyboard just by selecting General MIDI as the output device in games.

Reply 4 of 8, by Mike

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So, all I have to do is buy the cable, hook it up to the Casio piano and the the SB16, select General MIDI as the music sound card, and I am ready to go...
If I am lacking a step here, let me know, THX!!

Reply 5 of 8, by vasyl

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That should work but it is very likely that the music will sound rather odd. In many cases "General MIDI" refers only to physical implementation and protocol but not to the patch set. I have Alesis Nano Piano synth that has "General MIDI" written all over it but it maps all 128 patches to different versions of grand piano. Casio is probably closer to the standard set but YMMV.

Reply 6 of 8, by HunterZ

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In that case they're really not 100% General MIDI compatible. General MIDI does specify what numbers should map to what instrument sounds, although it doesn't get very specific about how, say, a "trumpet" should sound.

I'd have to agree that most MIDI keyboards are not likely to sound even as good as a Yamaha XG or Roland GS software synth (but those aren't available for DOS).

Still, it's probably better than using Adlib/OPL music that the SB16 is capable of.

Reply 7 of 8, by vasyl

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Yeah, that device was definitely not General MIDI compatible in that respect. The manual actually did not refer to General MIDI. Similar NanoBass unit was not marked as General MIDI (I vaguely noticing that in store as an oddity), maybe they fixed that mistake in the later models. Could be also related to the fact that the unit was part of the trio: NanoSynth/NanoPiano/NanoBass. The first one was General MIDI, the other two could be used as specialized enhancements for certain instrument ranges. Go figure. I think there was time when General MIDI term was somewhat misused. Looks like professional musicians just did not care that much for it anyway.

You are right about keyboard sound quality. Unless it is something from the high end (Roland, Alesis, etc) it is not going to produce good sound. A lot of consumer range keyboards are actually based on OPL3 or OPL4 -- even relatively expensive Clavinova that looks like real piano still does sound pretty much like Soundblaster... High-end keyboards are quite different but a) expensive; b) often not General MIDI.

Reply 8 of 8, by HunterZ

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Yep. I mostly use my MIDI keyboard (Yamaha PSR-280 I think) as an input device to my PC for composing. I'm thinking of buying a Yamaha DX-7 from eBay, as I hear it has a classic FM synth and also has both pitch and velocity knobs on the left side that are essential for things like orchestral sequencing (not that I'm that talented of a composer or anything).