Roland GS

Roland

Roland Corporation

is a Japanese manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, electronic equipment and software. It was founded by Ikutaro Kakehashi in Osaka on April 18, 1972, with ¥33 million in capital. In 2005 Roland's headquarters relocated to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture. Today it has factories in Japan,...

 GS, or just GS, sometimes expanded as General Standard or General Sound, is an extension of General MIDI

General MIDI

General MIDI or GM is a standardized specification for music synthesizers that respond to MIDI messages. GM was developed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee and first published in 1991...

 specification. It requires that all GS-compatible equipment must meet a certain set of features and it documents interpretations of some MIDI commands and bytes sequences, thus defining more instrument tones, more controllers for sound effects, etc.

GS takes into account some of the criticism of simplicity of original General MIDI standard, while retaining full forward compatibility and even some backward compatibility. GS defines 98 additional tone instruments, 15 more percussion instruments, 8 more drum kits, 3 effects (reverb / chorus / variation) and some other features,thus adding more sounds to the MIDI world. Roland also gave users their own MIDI file player called SB-55 Sound Brush and presented us the Sound Canvas, the first sound module to incorporate the General MIDI standard.

History

Organizations from around the world believed that General Midi could be made more versatile, so Roland created the GS standard. It is still an extension of the GM specification, meaning it can provide many extra controllers and sounds while still keeping to the sound map and obeying all the protocols of GM. This means the user of the Roland GS standard will also be able to play back any song designed for General MIDI, while still giving the option to add more effects and sounds. Composers can alter sounds with the Roland GS professionally using a set of Roland exclusive system features that allow the reconfiguration and customization to be achieved. The GS extensions were first introduced and implemented on Roland Sound Canvas

Roland Sound Canvas

Roland/Edirol Sound Canvas lineup is a series of PCM-based MIDI sound modules and PC sound cards primarily intended for computer music usage, created by Roland Corporation. All Sound Canvas modules are General MIDI compatible...

 series modules, starting with the Roland SC-55

Roland SC-55

The Roland SC-55 is a GS MIDI synthesizer sound module released in 1991 by Roland. The SC-55 was the first sound module to incorporate the new General MIDI standard....

 in 1991. The first model supported 317 instruments, 16 simultaneous melodic voices, 8 percussion voices and a compatibility mode for Roland MT-32

Roland MT-32

The Roland MT-32 Multi-Timbre Sound Module is a MIDI synthesizer module first released in 1987 by Roland Corporation. Along with its compatible modules, it established an early de-facto standard in computer music and was the first product in Roland's ミュージくん line of Desktop Music System packages...

 (although it only emulated it and lacked programmability of original MT-32) and gained explosive popularity.

The next major step in GS expansion was SC-88 that appeared in 1994. It brought counts up to 32 simultaneous voices, 654 instruments, and 24 drum sets, and occupied a position of high-end tone generator module in the market.

Currently, as software synthesizer

Software synthesizer

A software synthesizer, also known as a softsynth is a computer program or plug-in for digital audio generation. Computer software which can create sounds or music is not new, but advances in processing speed are allowing softsynths to accomplish the same tasks that previously required dedicated...

s become more and more popular, it became possible to reproduce SC-88 in software, but SC-88VL and SC-88Pro still occupy the professional musicians' niche.

Banks

The MIDI bank in the GS Standard is a recreation of the MT-32 patches. It allows additional sounds for the composer.
The comparison of GS to general MIDI is still there as the program in every individual bank will align with the original 128 in GM's instrument patch map.
The Sound Canvas used additional pair of controllers, cc#0 and cc#32, to specify up to 16384 (128*128) 'variations' of each melodic sound defined by General MIDI. Typically, cc#32 (Bank Select LSB) was used to select a family (i.e. 1 - SC-55

Roland SC-55

The Roland SC-55 is a GS MIDI synthesizer sound module released in 1991 by Roland. The SC-55 was the first sound module to incorporate the new General MIDI standard....

, 100 - MT-32

Roland MT-32

The Roland MT-32 Multi-Timbre Sound Module is a MIDI synthesizer module first released in 1987 by Roland Corporation. Along with its compatible modules, it established an early de-facto standard in computer music and was the first product in Roland's ミュージくん line of Desktop Music System packages...

 etc.) then cc#0 (Bank Select MSB) was used to set a particular variation bank.

Drum kits

The drum kits were assigned their own bank, cc#0 (Bank Select MSB) 127, cc#32 (Bank Select LSB) 0, and were accessible on any channel (but could not span more than two channels), with 9 different kits in total:

1 Standard Kit 9 Room Kit 17 Power Kit 25 Electronic Kit 26 TR-808 Kit

33 Jazz Kit 41 Brush Kit 49 Orchestra Kit 57 Sound FX Kit 128 CM-64/CM-32L

Additional percussion notes

There were 14 additional drum notes that span Drum Kits 1 to 49:

27 High Q 28 Slap Slapping In music, the term slapping is often used to refer to two different playing techniques used on the double bass and on the bass guitar.-Double bass:... 29 Scratch Push 30 Scratch Pull 31 Sticks 32 Square Click 33 Metronome Metronome A metronome is any device that produces regular, metrical ticks — settable in beats per minute. These ticks represent a fixed, regular aural pulse; some metronomes also include synchronized visual motion...  Click 34 Metronome Bell

82 Shaker Shaker (percussion) The word shaker describes a large number of percussive musical instruments used for creating rhythm in music.They are so called because the method of creating sound involves shaking them—moving them back and forth rather than striking them. Most may also be struck for a greater accent on certain... 83 Jingle Bell 84 Belltree 85 Castanet Castanet Castanets are a percussion instrument , used in Moorish, Ottoman, ancient Roman, Italian, Spanish, Sephardic Music, and Portuguese music. The instrument consists of a pair of concave shells joined on one edge by a string. They are held in the hand and used to produce clicks for rhythmic accents or... s 86 Mute Surdo Surdo For the football player of the same name see Surdu.The surdo is a large bass drum used in many kinds of Brazilian music, most notably in Axé/Samba-reggae and samba and its variants, where it plays the lower parts from a percussion section.... 87 Open Surdo

Additional controller

MIDI controller

MIDI controller is used in two senses.*In one sense, a controller is hardware or software which generates and transmits MIDI data to MIDI-enabled devices....

 events

Additional controller events included in SC-55 and SC-88 were:


0 Bank select MSB

5 Portamento time

32 Bank select LSB

65 Portamento

Portamento

Portamento is a musical term originated from the Italian expression "portamento della voce" , denoting from the beginning of the 17th century a vocal slide between two pitches and its emulation by members of the violin family and certain wind instruments, and is sometimes used...

66 Sostenuto

Sostenuto

In music, sostenuto is a term from Italian which means "sustained." It occasionally implies a slowing of tempo, though more often it refers to a very legato style in which the notes are performed in a sustained manner beyond their normal values....

67 Soft Pedal

Soft pedal

The soft pedal is one of the standard pedals on a piano, generally placed leftmost among the pedals. On a grand piano this pedal shifts the whole action including the keyboard slightly to the right, so that hammers which normally strike all three of the strings for a note strike only two of them....

84 Portamento Control

91 Effect 1 (Reverb) Send Level

93 Effect 3 (Chorus) Send Level

94 Effect 4 (Variation) Send Level

98 NRPN LSB

99 NRPN MSB

120 All Sounds Off

121 Reset all controllers

123 All notes off

SysEx messages

There were messages that allowed the user to turn the GS mode on/off, to set effects processor parameters, to change EG envelopes etc.

Supporting hardware

Beginning in 1991, Roland introduces GS support in the majority of its MIDI products.

Tone generator modules

RA-90 SC-55 SC-55mkII SC-33 SC-155 SC-55ST SC-55ST-WH SC-55K CM-300 CM-500

SC-7 SC-88 SC-88VL SC-88ST SC-88Pro SC-88STPro SC-8850 SC-8820 SC-D70

SD-90 SD-80 SD-35 SD-20

DS-330 (Boss)

Roland Sound Canvas

Roland Sound Canvas

Roland/Edirol Sound Canvas lineup is a series of PCM-based MIDI sound modules and PC sound cards primarily intended for computer music usage, created by Roland Corporation. All Sound Canvas modules are General MIDI compatible...

External links

• Roland GS SysEx messages reference