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[Kekskiller]

Hey fellows,

I listened to my Zelda: Ocarina of Time soundtrack once again and wondered how Koji Kondo achieved his awesome string sounds. You know, the first parts in "Kokiri forest" or several other tunes. It's not only the string sound, I would like to get into orchestral synthesis for my game. I was always stunned by how well Kondo did it the two N64 Zelda games. I'm not sure whether the sounds are synthesized or sampled. It sounds like a quality MIDI synth or antialiased sampler for me...

Does anyone know how to synthesize such strings? I want to recreate them on my DS-10, so there are lots of possibilities for me to synth 'em

[Craig Stern]

So...the very beginning part that isn't pizzicato? It just sounds like straightforward wavetable MIDI to me (all of it does, actually). You can probably get sounds like that from a soft synth.

[rogerlevy]

It's just basic General MIDI.  Nothing noteworthy.  I read somewhere that to save space most music on the N64 used samples stored in a table in ROM on the console, which couldn't have been very large, maybe no more than 2MB.  So the strings in OOT are probably the same ones used in Super Mario 64 and Starfox 64.   

[John Nesky]

Not that this answers the question of how to synthesize them, but you can download the Ocarina of Time soundfont here:
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/soundfont.html

[Kekskiller]

Not that this answers the question of how to synthesize them,

but you can download the Ocarina of Time soundfont here:
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/soundfont.html

:handshakeR: