Soundfonts

Using Sibelius to notate my Duke Ellington transcriptions, I have to rely on MIDI sounds to play back the scores on the computer. As you may know, the default MIDI sounds that come with a sound card are rather lacking. Most of the brass and wind instruments, particularly the saxophones, tend to be very synthetic and coarse in their tone. I have spent quite a lot of time searching the internet for decent soundfonts to give a more realistic and pleasant playback for the jazz orchestra.

Some of my favourite soundfonts are listed below. These I have found from various websites. Firstly, however, is my own creation:

Conn 12M baritone saxophone

I wanted to find a baritone saxophone soundfont that didn't sound like someone blowing down a plastic drainpipe. The coarse tone and excessive slap-tonguing of fonts I've found elsewhere have been unbearable, and I wanted something a little more like Harry Carney. This is therefore my very first attempt at recording and editing a soundfont from scratch. Despite the basic equipment - just a Shure C606 microphone plugged into my PC soundcard - the results are pretty reasonable. The tuning isn't especially good, but those with more patience can of course edit the font to introduce some fine-tuning.

The baritone saxophone soundfont has 15 samples in all, with no more than 3 pitches assigned to any one sample. My natural vibrato is included, and I have tried to loop the samples as best I can.

• Zipped conn12m.sf2 file download 2730kB

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