Talk:General MIDI

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Some things to note: (will probably fix later)
"Music Box" goes to a movie.
"Tubular Bells" goes to a record album
"Strings" and "String" go to different entries.
"Calliope" (synth) goes to the muse, not the instriment
"Kalimba" goes to a disambugation page.
"Woodblock" (Patch #116) goes to the object made to make wood prints.
"Bongo" goes to the antolope

These links have all been fixed now - Computergeek84 14:09, 3 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What is GM2, or "general midi 2"? --Abdull 14:42, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

See GM2 --Cyhawk (talk) 13:03, 8 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Need disambiguation between the technology standard and the techno musical group (see http://www.myspace.com/generalmidi) -- User:dc2000

Has been done. --Cyhawk (talk) 13:03, 8 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"" This is completely wrong, should start at zero not one, so minus a number from each instrument. Many Thanks myself Paul Moore and my partner in crime Mitchel Gladwin."" (this comment was in the article, moved it to the discussion page here.)

This has been explained since. --Cyhawk (talk) 13:03, 8 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Are you sure about this list of instruments in the article? The seemingly official list by MMA at http://www.midi.org/about-midi/gm/gm1sound.shtml differs subtly in a few places. It goes like this:

Acoustic Grand Piano
Bright Acoustic Piano
Electric Grand Piano
Honky-tonk Piano
Electric Piano 1
Electric Piano 2

Yesterday I have "fixed" MIDI, because it said that in General MIDI instrument 1 is the Grand Piano, but this page said instrument 3 was Grand Piano. If someone can tell which list is better, these things should be fixed. --Cyhawk (talk) 13:03, 8 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"note velocity"[edit]

Whuzzat? Loudness? (See Dynamics (music)). Please link properly, or use a more affordable term. TIA. --Jerome Potts (talk) 03:14, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Percussion[edit]

The percussion instruments were listed in an order that appeared to mirror the MIDI numbers of the melodic ones. However, the numbering started in the 30s, and moreover, the ordering does not match that which is in my MIDI program or on my synthesizer. I left the order for now - but I did remove the numbers - but should the sounds not be grouped by "category"? For example, placing all variations of cymbals together? -RadicalOne---Contact Me 17:10, 3 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note 37 says Side Stick but the link is to Rimshot. These are two completely different things. Alensiljak (talk) 20:58, 20 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Additional percussion instruments were added that are not defined in the General MIDI 1.0 spec. I'm reverting those changes, as they already appear in GS extensions. Parking the ones not listed:

25 Snare Roll
26 Finger Snap

--Brianflakes (talk) 16:55, 16 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Chiff[edit]

Anyone know what a Chiff?--JesusGTAFAN (talk) 20:31, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A synth sound with a strong attack. - Master Bigode (Talk) (Contribs) 19:41, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright on MIDI program names[edit]

Yesterday, I received a worrying question about a similar list. The same issue would probably affect this page as well. In short, the claim is that TMA holds the copyright on the instrument list, and that publication of any modified form is prohibited. For the complete discussion, see [1] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.224.240.191 (talk) 08:28, 1 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Program change descriptions[edit]

The "GM 1 Sound Set" Web page, which is the only source cited for the list of Program Change names, explicitly says that "General MIDI does not actually define the way the sound will be reproduced, only the name of that sound." The article contains fairly detailed parenthesized descriptions for many synthesized sounds, such as "119 Synth Drum (a synthesized tom-tom derived from Simmons electronic drum)." Many of the descriptions are also about what a sound "usually" sounds like, which strongly implies original research into how a variety of different synthesizers interpret that program change number. Those descriptions certainly didn't come from the reference cited. The reference doesn't mention "the Simmons electronic drum" at all, for instance. And from the reference, which I emphasize is the only reference for the list, it actually seems that no such detailed descriptions can correctly exist at all, because the specification is limited to the names. If descriptions of sounds beyond their names are going to be included in the article, then they need a reliable source. I'm not deleting them, at least not yet, because I've heard rumours that GM is actually just a codification of the sound set that was built into a specific synthesizer produced by one of the MIDI Consortium members at the time. If that's true, if it can be sourced, and if there are good descriptions of that synthesizer's sounds, then including them in the article would be quite worthwhile to give readers some idea of what the authors of the spec had in mind, notwithstanding that the authors of the spec said they were leaving the actual sounds deliberately unspecified. I'd really like to see descriptions like this for all GM sounds - if they are really verifiable. But if the descriptions are just a consensus of what one or more Wikipedia editors believe, without a reliable source, then the article should not be presenting these descriptions as factual information. 2607:FEA8:1280:5D00:0:0:0:D06B (talk) 03:21, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]