Getting kit drum sounds working on MIDISID

This week I've been mostly working on the drum 'patches' within MIDISID. 

This demo uses a single voice on a single SID. Some of that drum track is being lost because of the nature of general MIDI and MIDISID. Drums are usually on channel 10, MIDISID is designed to channel one MIDI channel to one voice, so we're limited to one note at a time.

Mostly, this work has involved a lot of coding and debugging of wavetables and other types of table. This bug kept me busy for quite a while!

But I've also spent some fun time designing the sound patches. Here is my tom sound in progress, playing the famous intro to Eastenders


An important question has been whether I want to work hard to try to make the sounds as realistic as possible or to make a set of sounds that are in keeping with the distinctive SID chip's sound. I think the answer is that the SID is an analogue synthesizer and even if I try to make realistic sounds, it will definitely still have that character.  The tom sound above can sound fairly realistic, so that's what I'm going with for the percussion (channel 10) tom sounds, and a more synthetic version of it for MIDI program 119 (synth drum).  The general midi spec contains a number of 'synth' instruments, so those can be used for the special and distinctive SID sounds. 


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