Greetings -

I was reading the specs on the Ketron XD3 and noticed that it has 292 General Midi voices. I thought General Midi was a standard set of 128 voices. I had believed the purpose of General Midi was to allow midi files created on ANY vendor's equipment to sound the same on another vendor's equipment, e.g. the sax on one GM file is the same as a sax on another vendor's GM file.

Makes sense with 128 voices but how does having 292 GM voices help?

Thank you.

Someboy's gonna read this and give you a much better detailed explanation, but for now let me give you my understanding of how this works:

The MIDI standard is a set of rules which help different musical equipment talk to each other. Among those rules are the 128 basic sounds all GM instruments should emulate. This does not mean that all saxophones will sound the same, but that the sax sound will be found at the same numeric location on all instruments (the timbre and quality of the sound would depend largely on the sample used to make the sound). Roland (GS) and Yamaha (XG) have found a way to expand the midi instrument tables and use some proprietary sys ex to access those sounds.
Now back to basic GM: In addition to the basic 128 sounds (bank 0) there are other 'banks' (1,2,3) that may contain variations of a sound - for ex. piano, organ or even sax. In addition (or should I say includud), there may be 9 or 22 or ? drum/percussion sets. These too use the bank concept. So, I guess it would be possible for a GM keyboard to have 292 or even 512 General MIDI sounds. Since Keytron is probably not using GS or XG format, they are probably loading sound variations into banks. Technics does that (I have a digital console paino) but simply calls them variations without bringing attention to the GM situation.

Cass