Yamaha XG

Yamaha XG or just XG is an extension to the General MIDI standard, created by Yamaha. It is similar in purpose to Roland's GS Standard. Relative to General MIDI, XG increased the number of available instruments from 128 to over 600, and introduced a large set of standard controllers and parameters that composers could employ to achieve greater subtlety and realism in their compositions.

In the mid-1990's, Yamaha released the first XG-based products for PC users, the DB50XG daughterboard and SW60XG ISA PC card. Coupled with their tone-generator, both devices included an on-board 4MB sound bank chip of sampled instruments and became highly desirable among MIDI fans due to their crisp, high-quality soundFact|date=September 2007. These devices feature an effects processing system with individual stereo reverb and chorus effects on any of 16 channels, and the ability to route any of the channels through an additional 'insertion' effect, and even guitar amp and wah-wah pedal simulations. Yamaha's in-house song-writers often utilized these tools to demonstrate the power of the XG format, notably recreating Jimi Hendrix leads complete with feedback, flamenco guitar with distinct pick/hammered notes and finger slides, growling saxophones, and even a very convincing sitarFact|date=September 2007.

The DB50XG and SW60XG are discontinued, but the SW1000XG (also discontinued) has been popular in the professional music industry, and even many of Yamaha's "toy" keyboards implement a subset of XG. Many notebooks include the Yamaha YMF7xx chipset which has a scaled-down XG-compatible MIDI synth. Available only in Japan also is a DB60XG, effectively a DB50XG with an analog input [http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may98/articles/audiotrix.html] .

See also

* Comparison of MIDI standards
* Yamaha MU-series sound modules