As it reads in the description, I made a video as a plea for help that I put on youtube; I guess I’m just not asking the right questions with people or I’m coming off as completely stupid. At least now you can hear my confusion:
I wouldn’t waste your time trying to transfer/record all the sounds from your keyboard. You can probably get all the same sounds (and perhaps even better) from a nice soundfont and soundfont player instead. These will perform in an almost identical fashion to your keyboard, so you should feel right at home.
Step 1:
Grab a soundfont that is GM (General MIDI) compliant, which will contain all the same sounds/tones that you can find on your keyboard.
There are many great free ones out there to choose from, varying in size and quality, but I can personally vouch for the “FluidR3 GM Bank” which you can download from the synthfont.com website. The Church Organ and Shamisen in there sound great, as do all the other instruments.
Step 2:
Find a soundfont player that you can load into Renoise as a VST plugin instrument. There are quite a few out there to choose from, but if you’re on Windows then my personal recommendations would be either of the following:
- Shortcircuit by Vember Audio.
Shortcircuit works and sounds great, but it is more of a general sampler than a fully-fledged soundfont player. While it can load soundfont files, you can only load a single sound (tone) at any given time, so you’ll need to use multiple instances of the plugin if you plan to play multiple sounds. A slight inconvenience, but the plugin is otherwise superb and very flexible.
You can download it free from: http://vemberaudio.se/shortcircuit.php (I recommend v1.1.2)
- SFZ+ by rgc:audio (now distributed by Cakewalk)
SFZ+ has been around for a while and is considered to be one of the best soundfont players out there. It’s free, but since Cakewalk acquired it from rgc:audio you must now “order” it through Cakewalk’s online store (for $0.00), rather than simply downloading it directly. If you do not already have a user account with Cakewalk, then you’ll also need to create one and provide your name, email, address, etc. Quite a pain in the ass just to get a free plugin, but you don’t necessarily need to give your full details if you don’t want to (just fill out your name and email, and put “n/a” for the other fields if you prefer).
You can get it from: http://cakewalk.com/products/SFZ/default.aspx
A quick tip from me when using SFZ+: Set the mode to “PR32” when loading large soundfonts, otherwise you’ll get annoying memory errors, and sometimes the soundfont will have glitchy playback as well. All should perform smoothly in PR32 mode, though.
Thank you for all of that information!
How I feel right now, learning all this new terminology; must be how my parents felt when, as a child, I used to program their quasar vcr for them. The learning process for me, is definitely taking the time, watching tutorials and hopefully relaying the right questions to get the correct answer.
Thanks again!