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Synthetic Concertina


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I have this contraption (aka Roland Aerophone ae10 wind synthesizer) that can emulate various musical instruments. There are too many to list, but some of my favorites are sax, flute, oboe, tuba, harmonica, violin, cello, and accordion. The list of 128 sounds does not include the concertina.

 

Is there anyone on this forum who might know of where I might be able to find or how to create a concertina sound patch that I could load into my contraption?

 

Thanks,

 

Kurt

Edited by Kurt Braun
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Phil Taylor created a very high quality Concertina Sound Font in SF2 format, made from his baritone Wheatstone English concertina (ca. 1906). Don Taylor (no relation) modified (tuned) it. For years he linked to it in his sig, but it seems to have disappeared. Here's a link to it in my dropbox. I don’t know how to load it into your contraption or whether it will work there, but it’s worth a try.

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1 hour ago, David Barnert said:

Phil Taylor created a very high quality Concertina Sound Font in SF2 format, made from his baritone Wheatstone English concertina (ca. 1906). Don Taylor (no relation) modified (tuned) it. For years he linked to it in his sig, but it seems to have disappeared. Here's a link to it in my dropbox. I don’t know how to load it into your contraption or whether it will work there, but it’s worth a try.

It's still linked in Don's sig as far as I can see. Maybe your machine got temporarily screwed? It is indeed very

high quality...

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I wouldn't hold my breath (pun intended, though the gadget seems to be very nice) that it's possible to change the sound fonts, at least with respect to the internal synthesizer (ie everything that is output through the internal speakers of the instrument). This list here implies that the sound fonts are hardcoded in the firmware.

 

Yet the rules change when the flute is used as a MIDI instrument over USB, because in that case the instrument code is just a number sent to the recipient of the MIDI data (usually some PC based software). That software is free to reinterpret the instrument code and remap it to whatever it wants. Thus Phil's sound font may be loaded into some MIDI synthesizer software to replace an existing sound font (instrument), allowing the sound input from the MIDI flute to sound like a concertina.

 

I may be wrong though. Some wiz my be able to analyze the firmware image and patch different sound fonts into it...

 

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The sound font, which should still be in my sig below, is in SF2 format which was the standard midi format for many years and should still be accepted by a midi player.  (The SF2 format has been superceded by the SFZ format which gives more human sound music).

 

There is one problem with this sound font in that it gets confused with very high notes and plays a note a fifth higher than played, but I have never found to be a problem with music that I want to play.

 

If you play concertina and use Musescore then this font works very nicely in Musescore.

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3 hours ago, RAc said:

This list here implies that the sound fonts are hardcoded in the firmware.

But on that same page is a link to here, which is a page of downloadable sound libraries. It’s not clear, though, that the SF 2 format is compatible.

 

19 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

The sound font, which should still be in my sig below

So it is. It was early in the morning and I was looking under your name and avatar in the left margin, rather than at the bottom of a post.

Edited by David Barnert
Fixed link.
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11 minutes ago, David Barnert said:

But on that same page is a link to here, which is a page of downloadable sound libraries. It’s not clear, though, that the SF 2 format is compatible.

 

But on that same page, if you scroll down to the bottom there'll be a list of Roland Synthesizers to which you can download the Axial fonts ("select your synthesizer"), and as far as I can tell, the Ae-10 is not among them.

 

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8 minutes ago, RAc said:

But on that same page, if you scroll down to the bottom there'll be a list of Roland Synthesizers to which you can download the Axial fonts ("select your synthesizer"), and as far as I can tell, the Ae-10 is not among them.

You're right. I don’t know why that page is linked from the AEROPHONE AE-10 page. Meanwhile, this video suggests you can use sounds resident on your computer or phone/tablet with a bluetooth connection (it describes the Mini version, but the basic features should be similar).

 

 

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Thanks people.

 

I'm still working this.  I'm in a world that I know nothing about (been in others many times in my life).  I'm confident that I'll get through this, though it might be a day or so.

 

Kurt

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No, I never figured out how to load the sound into the contraption.  But I did load the font into a DAW and even more hassle free a font player (I settled on Sfzando). Then I connect the midi out on the contraption to the usb port of the computer. I have a thin and light Surface Pro loaded with my sheet music that is always nearby, so no problem. I also loaded the concertina font into Musescore as suggested.

 

David, you might be interested to know that I used the contraption to lay down a cello track at a recording studio my wife was using a few days ago. That was my very first cello gig and I was really pleased at how well it was recieved.

 

Kurt

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  • 7 months later...

Hello all

 

I'm looking for a way to contact Phil Taylor. I've downloaded, and am composing with his concertina soundfont at the moment. I'd like to know if Phil would mind me using his soundfont in a project I'll be submitting to a music library, hopefully for eventual broadcast.

 

I've tried searching with his name here, but without success, but I acknowledge that may be due to newbie finger trouble. If anybody can put me in touch with Phil please.

 

Thanks in anticipation.

 

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3 hours ago, Avnaskubi said:

I'm looking for a way to contact Phil Taylor.

Last I heard from him (10 years ago) he was at barfly (at) dsl (dot) pipex (dot) com. That address is probably no longer valid, as his “BarFly” software is no longer, but it might be worth sending a message there and see what happens.

 

I’m not on facebook, but there was a message on melodeon.net a couple of years ago that referred to a FB message from him. If you’re on FB, you might try to track that down.

3 hours ago, Avnaskubi said:

I've tried searching with his name here, but without success

I don’t believe he’s ever had a presence here on concertina.net.

Edited by David Barnert
formatting
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