And yes, to a certain extent, you can see the progression through the different standards by which MSB/LSB CC’s are used. But even Roland stopped having 100% compatibility quite a while ago. The MMA (MIDI Manufacturers Association) got everybody to agree for about 20 years, then there started to be proprietary functions for Yamaha (S.Articulation, Guitar Modes etc) that had no Roland equivalent, and gradually the two standards diverged.

But we went from having 128 sounds total to thousands now, and it was just too difficult to keep everyone in lock step as they kept trying to outdo each other..!

The vast majority of SMF’s you find on the web are GS, with occasionally some XG (they’re usually marked as XG). So they should play without much work in the BK9. But one of the biggest things that changed was, we went from each drum sound having ONE sample to multi-velocity drum sounds, so older drum parts may need some work to play well.

For an old GS module, there’s very little difference between a low velocity hit on a high volume sound and a high velocity hit on a low volume sound. But once there are several different e.g. snare sounds as you increase velocity, balancing the velocity against the volume makes a huge difference.

I find myself spending the most time when editing old SMF’s in scaling the velocity response and volume of drum sounds (and things like acoustic guitars or anything where dynamics alters the sound) so that the part ‘sits’ in the sweet spot of the new sound’s range.

Truth is, once we moved away from simple one sample per sound modules and keyboards, it was rare to find an SMF that didn’t need tweaking to sound its best! But compared to the HOURS it took trying to play a Korg sequence on a Roland etc., it’s still a useful standard…