Slapstick Sound
Hello! So, I am putting a slapstick part in a medley I am making. The only thing, is that there is no slapstick. So, what instrument sound closest to a slapstick? I tried the whip, but it sounds like a tom tom. Bug? Thanks!
-TheBandGeek4Days
Comments
Generaml MIDI does not define a sound for that instrument, so few soundfonts will include any. That means we need to substitute something else. Apparently GM pitch 41 - "Low Tom 2" - was chosen for whatever reason. I personally would probably have picked 39, "Hand Clap". If playback is important to you here, I guess I'd recommend using hand clap and just changing the staff name.
Not being a percussionist, I have no idea what a splapstick should sound like.
If you are willing to provide MIT Licenced samples, however, I will make sure they get into a future update of the default soundfont.
Samples should be presented in 44.1KHz 16 bit mono format, prefereably as WAV although any other raw PCM waveform type would be acceptable.
Do NOT send as MP3 - MP3 is well known for mangling percussion sounds, particularly those with high frequency band components.
In reply to Not being a percussionist, I by ChurchOrganist
In Italian: Frusta (Whip):
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frusta_%28strumento_musicale%29 .
I do not know if the link may be of interest to you:
http://www.suonoelettronico.com/suoni_wav_effetti_download.asp?testo_en…
Regards
In reply to In Italian: Frusta by Shoichi
Ah, thanks Shoichi, that makes things clearer.
In fact the whip/slapstick is defined as part of the Standard GS drumkits as assigned to Note #E0 in all apart from the Orchestral Drumkit!
As such it is already present in the defautl soundfont.
So customising a DRM file which defines that would be the way forward as a temporary measure.
Ultimately tweaking the Instruments.XML file for the next incremental update would be possible.
EDIT: Note E0 is MIDI Note #28
In reply to Ah, thanks Shoichi, that by ChurchOrganist
Can we safely use sounds in instruments.xml not in the level 1 spec? I guess maybe we do elsewhere as well? Do we have any sort of graceful fallback handling for soundfonts that are level 1 only? Seems that might be a nice thing to do, if it is possible to detect this. Maybe not an issue if most GM soundfonts really are GS-compatible, which may well be true?
In reply to Can we safely use sounds in by Marc Sabatella
Well as General MIDI Level 2 which incorporates the relevant GS extensions into the GM standard has been around since 1999 I would say yes.
The only effect it would have would be silence if the note was missing in a particular soundfont.