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Various of the MIDI songs on this site have been slightly tweaked using Cool Edit Pro, from Syntrillium Software. The bass coming off the synth is sometimes a little light, a little weak. And as the Roland SCD-15 is a second generation sampled patch synth, some of the tone, some of the frequencies for the patches, as good as the Roland patches are, seem still a bit too 'brittle' or 'synthy' (and not that trying for 'real sounds' is necessarily the goal, just to avoid something overly distracting). One of the things you shoot for in converting to mp3 is a bright sound and a loud volume, if just to compete with similar mixes by assorted others posting to mp3.com. Of course, too bright can mean it sounds too tinny, or too 'brushy', or whatever. But soft tune, loud rocking tune, whatever, it seems that people download and prefer loud, bright, well balanced mixes. Plus, the brightness helps in preserving some of the song when converted to the mp3.com 'lo-fi' mono mp3s (used for preview, streamed over a slow 28.8 dial-up modem). What I do, simply, is try to remove any DC bias (where the audio from either channel is sort of 'off-center'), with a hum filter (Scientific Filters, Remove Subsonic Rumble) or a noise reduction, then repeatedly compress, and then give it the final touches, maybe highlighting the attack, maybe particularly running a parametric filter to give it the right tone, maybe cut some low midrange for guitars, and other things. Cool Edit Pro can run the filters in two ways.
I have the basic macro set for download. MIDI.SCP then goes in the /scripts sub-directory of Cool Edit Pro. How to record the MIDI, in the first place?
Now you have the MIDI, converted to audio, we'll say in Cool Edit Pro. Best to save it, as is, just like that, in case the filters don't quite sound right. So you've got the recording as a .wav file on the HD. Maybe turn off the UNDO, cause it takes time and memory. You're ready for the filtering. From your HD, wherever you placed it, load MIDI.SCP in as a new macro (Options, Scripts/Batch Processing, Load). And there's three macros in it.
Compression, even overcompression perhaps, tends to work well with loud rock tunes. It removes the dynamic range by just moving the low volume up to the high. A picture of the wave looks less and less 'spikey' as it gets compressed. Of course, for mellower tunes, for those where one might like to actually hear more of a range, this is not something that will sit well. But in its place, and for such a use, it isn't half bad. If it gets too compressed, it will sound 'compressed', mushy, and not clean, or ironically, as loud, as it otherwise might. Has to be used with caution. Better to get a loud, clean sound at the recording, itself. Part of MIDI hi-lo does tend to center the waves, and perform a sort of noise reduction. But it might be advisable to reduce the noise at first, as the first thing. In Cool Edit, you can select the first portion of 'dead air' to create a sample. Then select the whole wave, open the Noise reduction filter again, and run it on the entire wave. If you later use Compress or Prep/Compress, the next step would be trying to get the final sound. For these, I just show the filter codes, here. You have to copy from here, and paste into that Cool.INI file in the Windows directory, pasting under the .ini sections shown below. Then re-open Cool Edit Pro, select the whole .wav, and run the filter. If it doesn't sound quite right, you can go back and move the little sliders for the filter, while you preview the result - realtime. Under [Parametric Equalizer], you'll see Item10=, or whatever. Just get to the last Item number, and add that for lights out, and add the next number up for rat2 (e.g. Item11=lights out, . . ., Item12=rat2 . . ).
All these MIDIs were recorded pretty much at full volume, as mentioned above; 100% more or less .wav amplitude. In Windows, that can be controlled with the Recording, Post-Mix, or by increasing the Playback, MIDI volume, or just general Playback output volume. The Prep and Compress was run on each song. Just like that. Then for the songs shown here the appropriate Transform, Filters, Parametric Equalizer filter was run.
Under [Envelope], for the next item number:
Under [Dynamics Processing]:
The Transform, Amplitude, Envelope, Fade Out is useful for fading the tail end of the song. You can trim the front part right up to when it starts playing, and then prefix 2.2 seconds or so of silence, so you can upload to mp3.com. The seven Transform, Amplitude, Dynamic Processing filters, above, can be tried out, as well, to see how they sound (Dynamic '9', by the way, is also used in the compress MIDI.SCP macros). The same things would be done if recorded as a whole from the synth, or track by track, as is more customary. Guess She Showed Me, at mp3.com, was recorded track by track, and perhaps sounds a little more 'open' or bouncier (I don't know). But the prep work and filtering must be done for each track, to draw out the tone and sound. And at 20-40 meg or more, per track, it can eat up a lot of HD space very quickly (not to mention memory). And if this changes the mix from the MIDI file, too much, some obvious volume correction at points, or whatever else, would be required, just as in a studio. In addition, as the songs, here, typically use distorted guitars, or electric pick-up samples (limited as they may be) in the synth, the ideal would be to isolate each 'finger', each separate note line, of each guitar, in order to apply tremolo or effects to each 'finger', as is sometimes done with bar chords, or to selectively 'mute' at the bridge, or run overtones here, but not there, change the equalization even, for one, but not another, and so on. Lots of HD space needed. It would, however, make for a much more sophisticated and realistic sound, or if at least not playable, something that wasn't distracting for being too 'stiff' or denuded. As mentioned above, I've also been playing around with some DirectX plug-ins, which run in Cool Edit Pro, or any digital audio editor which can use such plug-ins. One set of click and noise reducers comes from Sonic Foundry. Another set comes from Waves - which has some powerful equalizer, stereo, and compression filters. There are a lot of these DirectX filters around, costing sometimes quite a bit. And one is from DigiLogue, which they call Blueline. And it is free (at least when I wrote this article, originally, some years ago). It consists of a number of filters - gate, parametric equalizer, chorus, and so on. I've found it tends to round out a sometimes harsh MIDI generated sound, though it can soften it a bit too much, as well. The Waves filters are even better, and also can lose some 'dynamics' if one isn't careful. I haven't been able to find a config file where the filters are stored, so I can't just copy in a row of numbers, as above. I will just copy what it shows on the screen, instead (and if you try out these filters, you'll see what goes where).
I have used the following settings, for the BlueParamEQ filter:
And there's this for the Blue Reverb filter:
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