They generally try to cater for all styles of music which means that they can't do any single style really good. GM banks are compromises between size, quality and range of instruments. Just don't expect to be able to do anything.įinally, another point I'm trying to make here is that there is no excuse for using GM soundfonts to make orchestral music. Will this prevent you from making good music? Hell no. Your palette will be limited to only a few select colors.
You can't use a pp trombone section if you can't find a sample of a pp trombone section. You can't do fast runs or detache passages with a string sample that has a slow attack. Unlike a pro library that has all the stuff one could possibly need for making orchestral music, using free samples only will give you far fewer options and you will have to let the samples dictate the kind of music to write. The biggest problem with relying on free samples is that you will be limited by what you can find. Up to mainline standards in terms of sample quality? I don't know. Violin version 0.1 (also known as AAViolin?)
In the example clip below I used the following ones*: So, I dived into my samples folder and plucked out some of the highest quality freebies I could find.
As there has been some talk about making music with free samples and tools here lately, I set out to determine if it's possible to make music of mainline quality using only free samples.
