I am a owner of a Roland MT32, Sound Canvas SC55 and Sound Canvas SC88 and i am really happy. I would love to acquire also a Yamaha M50 or M80 but it is not necessary. All this stuff already complete me 😀.

moturimi1 wrote on 2018-03-04, 10:44:

I used to own a lot of different external GM modules to test the playback capacities in DOS games.
SC-55, SC-8820, SCD-70, SC-8850, SD-20, SD-50, SD-90, SD-80, K2000, K2000XV, MU-10, MU-50, XV-5050, XV-3080, JV-1010, NS5R, AG-10, DOX-1 (Korg PA-60).
I have to say that in most cases the GM bank of the modules is underwhelming. Most use only basic instrument patches. The modules shine with individual sound banks or instruments.

This was a hard lesson to learn back in the 2000s. I had been chasing the holy grail with AWE32 and Live! Sound Fonts for years, and finally got a real synth module: An Ensoniq MR Rack. The demos sounded amazing. GM files sounded... not amazing. As it turns out, to get spectacular results, you have to be a spectacular composer who knows how to use the tools available in that particular module.

It's only gotten worse for GM. Today's soft synths are the way to go, with multi-GB sample libraries for every classification of sounds. (GB of pianos, GB of choirs, etc.) You can create a fairly convincing synthetic orchestra, if you're sufficiently qualified to operate a MIDI sequencer. But throwing a generic MIDI file at it will not yield impressive results. Real instruments have too much expressiveness that is only accurately rendered when the synth provides control of those parameters, and the composition makes use of them. Realism can't be had with static articulation. It's a fool's errand.

Shponglefan wrote on 2018-03-11, 16:11:

derSammler wrote:

"not to be confused with simply selecting the SC-55 map"

I should read more closely shouldn't I? 😵

But how is the SC-55 mode otherwise set on the SC-88 Pro? I know there's an SC-88 compatibility mode, but not aware of how to set an SC-55 one.

I don't have direct knowledge of the SC-88Pro, but I think they may have been confusing the map for a single channel with remapping all channels. At least, that's how it's done on my SC-8850. I press both PART arrows at the same time to access ALL parts, and select the INST MAP, after that, to make the entire synth use the other sounds. It doesn't revert the map automatically even when sent a GS reset. You can reset the map through the SHIFT+Part Left Arrow->Initialize All, though, or just by setting it with the method I already mentioned. Still, if that is what they were saying, it is too confusingly worded to be left unsaid, as it really is just using the map of its predecessors (along with the throwback sounds that are used when you change the map of any one part/channel).