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i'm really glad that nukeykt made Nuked SC-55, a fully accurate software emulation of the Roland SC-55. the SC-55 is a very important device: it's the original General MIDI and GS synth, used for e.g. DOOM's OST. but most people know it only through bad imitation soundfonts
soundfonts are a wonderful thing, don't get me wrong, but they are not a good substitute for the original hardware that these MIDI compositions were written for. a soundfont can't reflect all the nuances of a synth, because that is not what a soundfont is for. it is only samples.
even the humble SC-55 from 1991 could do a lot more than your average soundfont player. it has many extensions to General MIDI: a song's MIDI data can adjust the parameters of the reverb and chorus effects blocks, remap MIDI controllers, route LFOs, edit envelopes, etc.
you can even draw images and ascii or katakana text on the screen, just with special messages in your MIDI data! that one's just for fun of course.
also, synths have particular hardware characteristics that shape the sound. the SC-55/SC-55mkIi can only play 24/28 notes at once…
so part of the art of composing for these MIDI synths was working within polyphony restrictions, timing things so when notes cut out, it's not noticed, or using the synth's (again nonstandard) channel priority and voice reservation features to ensure you can squeeze stuff in
also, any synth has its own particular quirks. there are definitely songs out there that won't sound right without the particular shape of the envelopes, size and shape of the filter cutoff transition band, LFO waveform, resampling artifacts, DAC artifacts etc being just right!
part of the art of writing for a synth like this is also exploiting things in unintended ways. i love using pitch bends to do formant shifting on piano samples, which gives a wonderfully dark piano sound. this, too, might also sound wrong with a soundfont
so having finally having an accurate emulator means people can finally hear compositions for this synth as they were meant to be heard, rather than potentially horribly mangled.
but maybe what i care about most is that, perhaps, this accessibility will improve understanding
if you care about the General MIDI era and that type of synth like i do, it's very depressing to read about it online. misconceptions abound everywhere. especially for people coming at it from a software perspective, living in a software age, most people won't “get it” i think.
but now there is a thing you can (fairly) easily download which, effectively, puts a perfect replication of the original and most legendary General MIDI hardware synth from 1991 right onto your computer. a new chance to experience what it was meant to be. and maybe appreciate it.
btw… if you want to experience a very accurate version of the heights that dream had reached by the end of the 1990's, Roland's “Sound Canvas VA” plugin is $69 for a lifetime license and will be discontinued on September 1st. just saying.
@hikari this sounds really interesting. I recently finished my first sound font and started working with it, finishing my first track today. One of my considerations is how I should do bus effects. N64 games used some actual digital delay at runtime. I’ve considered doing it in-engine to emulate but it seems wasteful. I can absolutely do it in DAW and that’s my method so far. Arguably the choices are too rich though. This looks like something I could use to impose reasonable restrictions. But also a bit complex x)
@jorin i enjoy the constraints. when i try to write for stuff that's less constrained, it's harder, there's too much choice
@hikari This is reminding me I need to try building it on macOS…