NOTE: Instruments are pooled, meaning that several Presets may share the same Instrument. Hence, in the simplest case, the Preset has only one Layer, referring to one single Instrument. The Instrument structure usually contains all the information needed to create the sound. The sound data used for a Layer is called an Instrument. In the simplest case there is only one Layer, which then has to cover the whole key range and also the whole velocity range. The MIDI standard defines MIDI channel 9 (on the scale 0 to 15) as the Percussion channel and hence all MIDI Programs in this channel will automatically call for a preset in bank 128.Ī Preset may have one or more Layers. Banks 0 to 127 are called the Melodic banks while bank 128 is reserved for Percussion presets. i.e there may be a slightly different Acoustic Piano in Bank 1 Preset 0 (1:0) than in 0:0. Very few SoundFonts have more than a few Banks in use. Hence the total number of Presets in a SoundFont file is large enough. Each Bank can hold 128 Presets and these are numbered either from 0 to 127 (or 1 to 128 - SynthFont uses the range 0-127). The Preset (also often referred to as an ”instrument”,Ī “program”, or a “patch”) is the feature that is visible to the outside. The overall structure of a SoundFont is described above.

Synthesia soundfont