Welcome to my Personal Page

            Circa 1960                          And this is what the years as done to me

Hi my name is John Foster and was born and bred in a town called Burnley which is in the North West of England.

As you can see from the photographs I've been playing music for quite a number of years.

After many years of playing with various bands and groups.I started sequencing music in the late 80's to accompany myself on the guitar.In those days I use an Atari ST FM with a 1020K RAM and no hard drive,but when that died in 1998 I bought a PC with 32 Meg of RAM and a 6.4 Gig hard drive. This enable me to make much more complex music ( I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.) I was really hooked.

In 1999 I decided to build my first Midi web site called

And now as you see I have built an XG site for those with XG sound cards. I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as I did making them.

XG versus General Midi

If your not familiar with the difference between XG and General Midi then here's a brief explanation :-

General Midi is the industrial standard for all electronic keyboards and sound cards. This ensures that all the voices (or patches) or compatible with any GM sound cards, tone generators etc. that simply means a guitar will always be a guitar and a trumpet will always a trumpet etc.

There are 127 different General Midi voices whereas XG has 692 if you include the 10 different drum kits and special sound effects.

XG which simply means extended general midi has the same 127 voices as General Midi but each voice can have several variations. Take for instance the trumpet, it has 4 variations where as the crystal patch has 17. I have found that a file using XG voices can sometimes create problems with certain GM equipment though this is not always the case.For more information about Yamaha XG products click on the link below

Free MIDI song data pesented by YAMAHA
Copyright (c) 1996 - 1999Yamaha Corporation All rights reserved.

If you have any comments or suggestions please email me at

johnhenry@fostery95.freeserve.co.uk