Instrument selection is, by far, the most subjective thing about midi editing. Two bards can edit the same song, and they will come out sounding completely different just from instrument selection alone. Many editors will have their favorite go-to instruments, which is one of the ways for a midi editor to have their ‘unique sound’ apart from everyone else.
With so many instruments in the game, the number of options and combinations you can pick can be quite overwhelming. However, there is one simple rule that can help you narrow down your choices: try to match the octave range of your part to the octave range of your in-game instrument.
For example, let’s imagine we start with the midi for a saxophone quartet, containing a soprano, alto, tenor and baritone sax. We notice that the soprano part plays in the range of C4-C7, the alto part plays in the range of C3-C6, the tenor part plays from C3-C5, and the baritone part plays from C2-C5. From this we can pick our favorite instruments in these ranges, such as assigning these parts to the oboe, saxophone, horn, and cello respectively.
This is of course just one possible combination we could pick. You still have lots of options, but narrowing down your choices based on octave ranges can really help simplify things.
The best way in MidiEditor to identify the octave range of a particular part is with edit > select all events from track > [select track]. Doing this, you will see the notes that part plays highlighted on the left of your screen on the vertical keyboard.
Using “select all events from track” to view the octave range for the saxophone.
Once you’ve identified the lowest and highest C notes that contain all your notes between them, then you can start picking your instruments. Of course, you will not always be lucky enough to always have every part playing within a three-octave limit. This is when you have to do a little editing to fix things. Of course there’s many different ways to handle this problem, depending on the situation, and we will cover this later.
Of course octave range is only one factor in picking what instruments to pick. Other factors include what instruments the original song used, the tone and temperament of the song, how fast it is, and so on. In lesson three of Bard 101 we go over each instrument in short detail, this may help you pick what instruments to use.
Other than that, your opinions and preferences on instrument selection can only come from trying things yourself. So experiment, don’t just pick the same instruments for every song!