Re: MIDI instrument for oboe d'amore

[Aaron Hill]

On 2019-04-29 9:28 am, Jacques Menu wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I find oboe and french horn, but no oboe d’amore in A.6 MIDI 
> instruments.
> Which other setting can I use for this instrument in A?

General MIDI does not define such an instrument in the standard, and 
neither did GS nor XG.  In fact, the reed section of GM Level 2 has no 
extended patches at all.  (GS and XG do have variations like the "bass 
clarinet" and some alternate saxophone patches.)

While it would not be standards-compliant, you could certainly select an 
alternate bank for the oboe patch with the intention that it means an 
oboe d'amore.  For your own usage, it would require you to manually 
configure your synth to load a suitable sound for the instrument.  For 
other folks using your MIDI file, their synths should fall back using a 
standard oboe patch which might work, except for lower notes that could 
be outside the playable range.

From what I understand, an oboe d'amore has a timbre between the normal 
oboe and the cor anglais.  What I would do in my virtual instrument 
software is load up an oboe patch but then apply some EQ to soften the 
sound a bit so it is not quite as assertive.  For the fact that the 
playable range is lower, I might also need to mix in a little of the 
English horn patch to fill out the lower notes, which will require 
blending to balance the timbre.  But it must be noted that this work is 
beyond the scope of MIDI.

> There’s no clarinet in A either.

For better or worse, a "clarinet in A" is simply a clarinet as far as 
General MIDI is concerned.  In MIDI you typically specify the pitch you 
want played, not the note that is written that may sound higher or lower 
depending on the instrument.  As such, MIDI note 60 would most often 
refer to the equal-tempered middle C whose fundamental is approximately 
261.63 Hz, and one should expect that any GM-compliant synth to render 
the pitch properly.  That said, I have encountered some sound libraries 
that intentionally transpose samples from their nominal pitches; and 
that requires manually transposing a MIDI track to compensate.  I 
dislike this practice as it is not very portable.


-- Aaron Hill