The Benefit of Soundfonts in Music Production

Are you a beat maker or producer who makes instrumentals on computer, either through music production programs such as FL Studio, Reason, or Orion Pro? Or perhaps you're more of a Cubase user? Have you come upon hip hop samples as Soundfonts without really knowing what they are or what they can do? Well, the next time you come upon them, you may want to reconsider using them before passing them up.

To briefly summarize what a Soundfont is, a Soundfont is an audio file created through the composition of several WAV Samples that are added into one file known with an extension of .sf2 which are called soundfont files. If you are a Reason user, and are familiar with Reason Refills, they are somewhat similar, except that Reason Refills are more complex and only used in Reason.

Soundfonts however, can be used in any beat maker program or music production program that either has a built in Soundfont player, such as FL Studio, or that utilizes the file extension, or a Virtual Instrument plugin that allows you to load soundfonts within the plugin. If you use Reason, you can load up Soundfonts within Reason via the NN-XT tool. This is a great benefit that Soundfonts have over other sound formats or Virtual Instrument plugins.

Soundfonts have other great benefits. While some Virtual Instrument plugins are of great quality, some of them can be rather large, take forever to load, and sometimes slow down the processing speed of your PC. This can have adverse problems to your instrumentals during creation, and sometimes during rendering, even on the fastest computer. However, with Soundfonts, you can have high quality musical instrument sounds on one file that will be easier to load, and generally use less PC power even with several soundfonts loaded.

Another benefit of Soundfonts is that you can have high quality sounds in a smaller compact size. Depending on the creation of soundfonts (as with any sound, whether Virtual Instrument plugin or otherwise), you may find high quality sounds with smaller file sizes, which can help you store a large amount of Soundfonts onto a DVD for transport to use in another studio set up. You can't easily take your Virtual Instrument plugins, but you can take soundfonts more easily.

Soundfonts come in a large variety of different musical instrument samples, from bass sounds and guitar soundfonts, to string samples, brass section sounds and horn samples, world instrument sounds, piano sounds, synth sounds, and other unique creations. Some soundfonts may even be a compilation of drum samples.

Soundfonts are definitely worth their weight in gold, and are sometimes overlooked for other more "glamorous" programs or formats. However, whether you make hip hop beats, rap beats, r&b beats, or even movie scores or video game music, the next time you come upon soundfonts and think of passing them by... you might just want to give them a try... they may work wonders in your next instrumental creation.