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The following is an interview with Roel de Wit from
Utopia Sound Divison, the people that
created the Utopia SoundFont.
Q: Why did you develop the Utopia Live! SoundFont and what were your
goals when creating it?
We were very much impressed by the power of the EMU10K1
DSP on the SB Live! especially considering that it was available for such
a low price when comparing to other similar products. We now had a low
priced soundcard with great potential which came with a MIDI patchset
that still dated from the years of the SB AWE series which was perfectly
balanced but really missed 'punch/depth and clearity'. In other words
it sounded all but 'alive'. The only alternatives were some (often badly
programmed) soundfonts from the Internet all more or less based on the
same samples. The few commercial alternatives also pretty much all had
the same problem the default 2/4/8 MB soundfonts have that come with the
SB Live! have. They don't have any 'life' them.
Because of this we started work our Utopia Live! soundfont.
To make sure that it wouldn't become just another soundfont we set a few
goals:
- The soundfont had to be balanced to play (nearly) all types of music.
To achieve this we spend almost half a year alone on testing it with
high quality MIDI sequences made specifically for the Roland SoundCanvas
range of sound devices. At the same time we sent out copies to a specialised
group of 'beta-testers' to make sure that if there where any 'glitches'
left we would find and eliminate them. This period probably was the
most important for the development of Utopia Live!
- We had to use a 'fresh' set of samples/sounds to make this patchset
sound unique. To put in as many sounds as possible we resampled all
the sounds to take maximum use of the SB Live!'s '8 point interpolation'
which allows samples to sound relatively good even when they are stored
at a very low samplerate.
- Utopia Live! had to have 'depth/punch/ambience', it had to feel alive.
- It was supposed to have some special features that also made it different
from all other soundfonts out there. Some examples are: stereo percussion
kits with extreme depth/punch, a lot of carefully multilayered (sometimes
real stereo) instruments.
- It had to be easily 'upgradable'. Considering that a SB Live!'s driver
updates often comes with changes in the MIDI- or EAX/Effects engine
the way that MIDI playback sounds also changes. Since Utopia Live! is
a commercial product we couldn't risk that it would become obsolete
by a single driver update resulting in unhappy customers. Because of
this we had to license a special patching system which allows us to
distribute self-executable update patches with a minimal download size.
Q: What makes a good SoundFont?
That's a tricky question. When you speak of soundfonts in
general a good soundfont is any soundfont that does what you want it to
do.
However there are some important things that distinguishes
one soundfont from a similar other soundfont:
- the quality of the samples
- if one can hear whether or not a a sample is looped
- in case of GM/GS soundfonts samples/instruments should be able to
be used next to each other instead of only sounding good in solos.
- the use of filters and other parameters to create special effects.
- small things like velocity sensitivity and things like natural panning
(e.g. with a piano from slightly left to slighty right)
- the creativity of the author
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