If you would like to hear some of my work, please head over to the new music gallery page. The music gallery has MP3 demos, MIDI files and Yamaha Mobile Music Sequence (MMS) project files. Feel free to download the MIDI files and MMS projects. I’ve also posted a few production notes for each track. The production notes describe problems, solutions and tweaks. This is the place to go if you would like to hear MMS applied to something other than EDM!

I just posted two songs — Memphis Underground and Comin’ Home Baby — two good old soul jazz tunes. Both tracks were initially composed using MMS and were exported as Standard MIDI Format (SMF) files. The SMF files were imported into Cakewalk Sonar. General MIDI (GM) instruments were assigned and levels were set in Sonar. I played the files back through a Roland Sound Canvas and then checked playback through Windows Media Player.

While going through this process, I discovered that MMS generates “stripped” SMF files. MMS exports initial program (patch) changes, but does not export channel volume, pan or effect levels. The program changes depend upon the hardware setting on the export page. The “SMF” option produces General MIDI-like program changes while the “MOX” option produces a weird mixture of GM and MOX voices. It looks like MMS tries to pick the MOX voice that most closely resembles the voice used in the MMS part. The MMS manual is not very specific about all of this and you should be prepared to modify patch changes and set levels when tweaking an MMS-generated MIDI file in your DAW/sequencer.

There were also a few fix-ups related to differences between the MMS XG-like sound generator, the Roland Sound Canvas and the General MIDI standard. GM defines only one drum kit with a limited selection of individual percussion instruments. For example, finger snap is not part of the GM standard. Both Yamaha XG and Roland GS (Sound Canvas) implement an extended GM kit. Of course, the extensions are different (!) and finger snap is assigned to different keys. So, you should expect to tweak the drum tracks in the MIDI files for your own sound generator. Roland and Yamaha also define their note numbers differently and bass instruments, in particular, may sound one octave higher or lower. Transpose away and have fun!