The band

The drums, the bass, the keys, the rhythm guitar and the colour layer you play along with are not recordings of a band. They are played live, note by note, by a sampler inside NØISE, from a sound bank: a file of recorded and synthesized instrument sounds with the rules for playing them. The format is SoundFont 2, the same one desktop MIDI players have used since the 1990s. The bank NØISE plays is the NØISE Band, and this page says what it is made of and under which terms.

Why a band of its own

Until the band was cast, NØISE played everything through one General MIDI bank, FluidR3 GM. It was never chosen; it was there. In September 2026 we compared it with two other open banks, song by song, blind, judging one thing only: does this sound like a band I want to plug my guitar into? No single bank won. One had the attack, the pocket and the room a live guitar needs; another had the body, the sustained harmony and the finished sound. So we did what a band leader does and cast every role from the library that plays it best, then measured and listened again until the roles were clear. The result is one compact file, downloaded once on first launch.

What it is cast from

All three are General MIDI banks their authors published for exactly this kind of use, including in commercial software, on the condition that their copyright notices and licence texts travel with the sounds. They do: the full notices ship with the file at noise-app.com/app_content/soundfont-licenses.txt, and the app's INFO panel links here. Broadly, the attack and groove roles - basses, guitars, brass, the pop and funk drums - come from GeneralUser GS; the sustained and harmonic roles - piano, electric piano, upright, strings, pads - from MuseScore General HQ, which also supplies the jazz kit, the rock pad and twelve more players: a bright piano, a marimba, a harmonica, a nylon guitar, a muted guitar, a fretless bass, a choir, a muted trumpet, two synth leads and two synth pads. FluidR3 supplies the drum kits: a power kit for rock and metal, a room kit for blues, the TR-808 for hip-hop. Which preset plays which role, and how each is levelled, is the band's own arrangement and stays with us.

Every drum genre plays its own kit, and every style has more kits to choose from; the list is on Jam.

What it is not

It is not a recording of musicians, and it is not a cloud service: the file lives on your Mac or iPad, nothing about your playing leaves it. It is also not a General MIDI player - every program is chosen for how it sits under a guitar, not for how a MIDI file sounds through it.

Credits

Thank you to Frank Wen for FluidR3, to S. Christian Collins for GeneralUser GS and for the MuseScore General adaptation, and to everyone credited in the MuseScore General HQ sample sources. Questions about the band, or about the licences, are welcome at the address on About.

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