Howdy M G,

You covered a lot in your previous post, so I'll take things one at a time, more or less

1. Soundfonts, banks, and instrument patches - These are some concepts that can certainly be confusing. I know it's taken me a while to understand what bit I do The short answer to your two questions, though, is no and no.

To explain: A soundfont is rather analogous to a typefont that you might use when you're printing out a document in something like MS Word or some other word processor. When you're preparing your document, you type out what you want to print, and then you can change the font type from something like Courier to Helvetica (or whatever) and get some very different looks.

With soundfonts, it's a similar situation. You prepare your "document" (ie, your score) in something like Composer. But you can use different soundfonts to make that same composition sound a bit different. An oboe may still be an oboe, but it's sort of like having different makes of instruments. So for a piano, it can be like the difference between a Steinway grand for one soundfont, or a Richmond console spinet for another. They're both pianos, but the sound you hear is quite different.

You may find one soundfont has really nice brass, while another has great strings. You can also have soundfonts that are not the general midi instrument list setup (the typical 1-128, starting with "acoustic piano"), but have only one or two instruments that are done really well, or are just "different". For instance, I have one soundfont that I use for testing (and fun) that has various animal sounds, such as hippo grunts and bird calls. I also have some soundfonts that are "pads" - they have a variety of instruments or sounds layered together to give a nice effect.

Now, some sound cards (not all) have "banks" that you can load soundfonts into. If you can imagine a filing cabinet with various drawers in it, the soundcard is like the cabinet (which is a "midi device" to Composer), and each "bank" is like a drawer. I can load one soundfont per bank (drawer). Then, within each of these banks/drawers, I can have a number of instrument sounds, which would be analogous to file folders. Each of these instruments has a number, which is one way that any midi program finds the instrument in that bank.

So, when I want to choose a particular sound, say the "hippo grunt" for a staff in Composer, then I would set the parameters in the staff setup dialog for the device (my sound card, which is "SB Audigy 2"), the Bank (001,000 "jungle animals"), the instrument patch (which is "2 hippo grunt" in this particular sound font).

Mark has set things up in Composer's device/bank/instrument setups such that you can enter or import your banks (drawers) and instrument patches for any devices (filing cabinet) that you may have. This is handy because then, when you are setting up staves in your composition, all the devices, banks, and instrument patch numbers will appear in drop down menus, making life much easier for using lots of instruments from lots of different fonts!

This may be overkill for an answer, but I hope something here makes sense

2. "Where we ought to be..." You can stay here if you want, or we can start a new thread elsewhere. Your decision, but I don't mind you being in "my" thread at all

3. The "vocal" voice - I can try out a couple of fonts that I have and see what you think. One difficulty with midi is that my sound card's 53 may sound quite different from your sound card's 53 - as well as different from anyone else's! It's sort of like you composing a piece of music while playing the melody on a hand-carved, custom made pearwood recorder, and then when I get the music, I'm playing it on a plastic Yamaha recorder - same notes, but it just won't sound the same

4. English horn on its own staff would be a useful thing for GPO, or is the piece such that you'd have english horn and oboe playing the same parts except for the solo? If so, I can set up separate staves for those.

5. Since the instrument changes for the strings are from bowed to pizzicato, I can use the way-cool "key switching" feature that GPO has for those, and that Composer supports (go, Mark!) to do those changes.

6. Tonguing notes: I'll have to take a look (and a listen) to the winds in GPO to see if there is a key switch instrument for tonguing/slurring, or if there is another technique to use for that. Mark, have you seen anything regarding this? I must confess it hasn't really come into my realm of experience - yet

Feel free to email the file to me anytime. It may be useful when setting it up for GPO to have the .not file with your annotations. And be sure to use small words and type slowly ;)

I have broadband so it won't take long to d/l, and you could send it to my Gmail account -

sacrann"at"gmail.com

Just replace the "at" with the @ symbol. I have around 2.4 Gb of storage space there, so it's not going to overload that mailbox

ttfn,
Sherry