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good lord, if you google the title of our new blog post, the one trying to give people a well-researched, fun, meaningful, myth-busting insight into the world of General MIDI, then Google will literally make up more bullshit for us to correct. this AI response is a hallucination!
like what do you mean “12 piano sounds”. there's exactly 6 in GM1, and the piano category only has 8 tones in it if you want to be so generous. and you know, there's more in GS or XG or GM2, but that's not the claim you made. fuck off and stop making shit up robot
and let us be absolutely clear here: General MIDI is already a topic for which the average online English-language resource relating to it is almost guaranteed to be dogshit. every wikipedia article relating to it is full of errors, hallucinations from before “hallucination”
we wrote that really long post about General MIDI for a lot of reasons, most of all because it was fun, but we've been wanting to write something like it for more than two years because more or less everyone you are likely to hear speak about it is misinformed or ignorant :(
granted, we know we didn't even attempt to provide a bibliography for our post, and we wonder if we should have. there are however ample hints given as to how you might be able to verify many of our claims if you had cause to doubt them, so… we hope it was enough
and before you wonder why we don't just fix wikipedia ourselves: believe me, we have been editing wikipedia for longer than some of you have been alive. but sometimes you discover a topic where the tree is so rotten it makes more sense to start afresh (so we made our own wiki)
“we run a wiki that has higher sourcing standards and better factual accuracy than wikipedia” is an audacious claim but it happens to be true for this particular topic, tragically
btw the secret to getting well-sourced info on old midi gear is to literally just read the manuals. every old yamaha or roland product — hell, every modern yamaha or roland product — has extensive, detailed documentation. often there's bonus PDFs with more niche info online too
but you see, that would be a primary source, and wikipedia structurally distrusts primary sources. we aren't saying that they would actually prevent you using them, but… it might start to explain why there's a problem here
while we're at it, if you buy any product of any kind that does anything relating to MIDI and it doesn't have a “MIDI Implementation Chart” in the manual or in some PDF on the manufacturer's website, you should threaten them with hammer—on guitar riffs. yes. Very nice ones :)