AWE 2 Mb GM bank - first release. Ivan Blumenschein - Rio de Janeiro - BRASIL ivsalati@omega.lncc.br Altough the AWE32 has a good hardware, most samples are not so fine. This bank is an effort to make this great board sound better, using Gravis Utrasound Max , Roland, Kurzweil, Ensoniq and even other samples I collected in many sites and BBSs. I made this bank for AWE users with 2Mb onboard, so you must have at least 2 Mb to load it (it's worthy - the sound quality in- crease is huge) and the bank is full 2Mb large. I spent about 2 months downloading samples, selecting the best, resam- pling what was possible, tuning instruments, matching loop points and envelopes and choosing what would be and what would not in the bank. This is a GM bank (with brush set -40- just to make sense), and I tried to improve the weakest spots of AWE. It contains 113 samples, and the changed instruments are: Acoustic Grand Piano Acoustic Bright Piano Honky Tonk E. Piano 1 E. Piano 2 Rock Organ Church Organ Reed Organ Steel str. Guitar Jazz guitar Clean guitar Muted guitar Overdrive guitar Distortion guitar Guitar harmonics Fingered Bass Picked bass Slap bass 1 Slap bass 2 Synth bass 1 Synth bass 2 Contrabass Pizzicato strings Voice ohhs Syn vox Orchestra hit Trumpet Trombone Muted trumpet French horn Brass Tenor sax English horn Clarinet Piccolo Flute Pan flute Bottle blow Fantasia Reverse cymbal Guitar fret noise Seashore (drums) High Q Slap Scratch push Scratch pull Sticks Side stick Kick drum 1 Kick drum 2 Snare drum 1 Snare drum 2 Handclaps Closed hihat Pedal hihat Open hihat Crash cymbal 1 Crash cymbal 2 Chinese cymbal Ride bell Tambourine Splash cymbal Cowbell Cabasa Short guiro Long guiro Muted cuica Open cuica Shaker Jingle bell Belltree Brush tap Brush slap Brush swirl These instruments were tottaly changed, but I also changed many others using the original samples, to make the dynamics get closer to Roland's (for example, the timpani's volume was too low, the tremolo strings had too much tremolo etc.). There are two ways to use this bank as your main bank (I'm sure you won't want to use that CC0 1 hassle. If you have the 2mb, use it as default bank): 1. Copy the USER.SBK bank to your SFBANK subdirectory (maybe c:\sb16\sfbank). Edit your \WINDOWS\SBWIN.INI file. Below the [AWE32], in the line user .... complete it: user=c:\sb16\sfbank\user.sbk Run windows. In AWE Control Panel, choose USER CUSTOM BANK All your windows applications will now use this bank as bank 0 (no control changes needed). 2. Just copy the USER.SBK to your SFBANK directory with the name synthgm.sbk. It overwrites your old gm bank, so backup it! (I suggest you to use the first way) To improve sound quality, add in the same place (below [AWE32]) these two lines: Bass=5 Treble=5 This minimizes a strange treble gain the AWE automatically produces (it's hardware stuff), making samples sound sharper than they should. Adding this, they'll sound more like they should (this applies to the ROM samples,too). There are many things in this bank that can be improved. I'm still trying to make it better, but as I didn't find any bank so complete as this one, I decided to upload it without finishing the make-up. You are totally free to make any changes, and if you do and it sounds better, PLEASE LET ME KNOW, send me an e-mail. If you tried this bank, please don't forget to send me your comment/ question/suggestion/flame. Ivan Blumenschein ivsalati@omega.lncc.br