There is provided a musical tone reproducing apparatus, which stores tone color parameters in a general-purpose storage means, to thereby shorten the time taken for a tone color changing process. A CPU 10 registers a tone color parameter group that has been read out from a RAM 11 in a tone generator memory 30, which is a general-purpose memory, in advance. The tone color parameters required when a tone generation core 33 carries out musical tone reproduction are stored in a cache memory 32 for all channels. Upon the CPU 10 giving a tone color changing command to a controller 31, a specified tone color parameter is read out from the tone generator memory 30. The tone color parameter for a specified channel in the cache memory 32 is then rewritten with the read out tone color parameter. The tone generation core 33 reads out from the cache memory 32 the rewritten tone color parameter set for each channel, and hence musical tone reproduction with a changed tone color is carried out. Because a tone color parameter group of a freely chosen number of tone color parameters has been registered in the tone generator memory 30, the need to transfer a tone color parameter from the CPU 10 to the tone generator memory 30 each time a tone color is to be changed can be removed as much as possible. Moreover, the output bit width of the cache memory 32 is made to be large, and hence the tone color parameter the tone color parameter can be set into the tone generator means instantaneously. Consequently, even though the tone color parameters are stored in advance in the general-purpose storage means, the time taken for the tone color changing process can be shortened, and hence the occurrence of a break in sound generation during tone color changing can be prevented.