The most important factor in my mind in choosing a keyboard is not the number of voices but the true polyphony, and this is one area where Yamaha has kept us in the dark regarding the Tyros. When using the Organ Flutes on other Yamaha instruments such as the 9000Pro, the polyphony drops dramatically due to the use of layered voices. This can be a problem when using the organ live with styles or midi backing... so much so that Yamaha recommends the use of the XG expansion board in the 9kPro if you plan on using the organ flutes with accompaniment. No such option with the Tyros. Does the added memory dedicated to the voices in the Tyros mean that organ flutes no longer eat up the polyphony? That's the 96MB question...

Also a problem when I use voices and heavy sustain. This isn't just a 9000 thing either. I find that I have the same problem with the Motif. Fortunately, I use the Motif " one voice at a time ". In other words, all I ever do is play the actual piece I want in real time on it. If I was playing along with a midi file or with arrangement ( as I would on my PA80 ).. yikes.. The other side of that is that it seems that when I use up the polyphony on the Motif, I hear it clearly because the notes I play aren't "there" ( I play and nothing happens ) . When I play my PA80, I know I have to be exceeding the polyphony at times, but it seems that if I am losing notes, they are dropping off the back end, so I don't notice it as I play.. if that makes any sense.

I use about 24 voices most of the time. I don't want to tweek or edit them. I want to push the button and go.

How much polyphony does a keyboard have to have to "NOT" have note fallouts no matter how you play it?

That all depends on the voice allocation. I have played 32 voice instruments that handle dropouts better than the 64 voice SD1.

There are very few keyboards that have more than 128 note polyphony. I agree though that many voices in the Tyros (and other keyboards) use more than 1 "note", and I had completely forgotten about those organ flutes! Wow... if the tyros has 9 footages, then we got about 14 note polyphony!!! I reckon they should have separate voice generators for the styles and keyboard voices (each of r1,r2,r3).

S.


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Simon G.K. Williams
simon@svpworld.com
Creative Music & Multimedia
http://www.svpworld.com
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Of course that's what's cool about the 9000Pro is that you can add polyphony: the piano expansion alone adds a respectable 64 notes to just acoustic piano thus leaving the full 128 notes of the keyboard for other things. Or you can turn that around and use the keyboard as a drawback organ simulator and use an XG expansion card with 32 notes of polphony for backing. How much polyphony you actually need depends on the number of instruments in your accompaniment or backing and your live playing style.

It's possible, just maybe, that the added memory of the Tyros means that more memory has gone into voice production and the organ drawbars don't take one-note-per-flute. We won't know until somebody makes a point of trying the Tyros simulated drawbar organ with accompaniment. But if Yamaha maintains the same scheme with the Tyros that it used with the 9000 Pro for organ flutes with no way to expand on the polyphony, then organists are screwed.

That's the way it works on the Motif too,. you add an expansion card ( XG ) and you get 64 more notes. The only problem with that is, those 64 notes are reserved for the Xg voices. They cannot be transferred to the main tone generator. Some of the XG voices are fine, but what I want ( and at present cannot obtain ) is more polyphony for the main tone generator.

AJ