I was told that after the newness wears off, most people typically use ony 12 voices on their keyboards. That sounds about right, I use about 12 voices. 700 voices are wasted on me, and I am not impressed. What a waste of wave ROM space that could have been used for quality sounds instead of quantity. Yamaha says,"Yamaha dedicates extra time and resources to these special voices" (sweet voices). Why not dedicate extra time and resources to 20 voices, and blow the competition away? Roland has 3500 sounds on their EM55, but the flute on the PSR550 blows it away. How about a Sweet concert Grand, sweet organ, sweet strings,etc. I would be impressed by that. Yamaha announces their 1st Sweet PSR keyboard. Wishfull thinking. Sigh.

Star,
Herein lies the obvious dilema.....which 20 voices, the ones you like, or the ones I like, should they concentrate their efforts on? The obvious answer is mine of course.
Terry

If you sequence with Cakewalk Sonar and your fav keyboard, the instrument definitions list allows you to type in say "ba" and see all instruments starting with those letters (to audition bass sounds for this example). While the song plays, you can try out many different basses and select the best for the song. You can can do this with organs, strings, saxes, guitars, flutes, trumpets, drum kits etc. or "live"/"sweet" voices on Yamaha keyboards. I use more sounds than I can keep count of this way.

Terry,
You're right. I like acoustic and orchestral voices, others might like the synth voices. Hmmm, Yamaha hasn't created a cool/sweet synth voice yet.
Kevin

Starkeeper,
Yamaha has just done this but those great voices come with a big price tag... The Tyros has the new "MegaVoices". I agree that it would make sense to really kick ass on some main voices like adding a sweet piano, sweet strings, sweet basses would be awsome, and other sweet and cool voices would work too... I too find that many of the sounds on my Yamaha won't ever get used.. I mean really think about it.. If you do jazz, rock, and classical, what in the world do you need all those sounds for.. Hell a basic rock band consists of a drummer, lead and back up guitar player, bass player, and sometimes keyboard players.. A song in that genere uses what..., basically 5 sounds.. Same with Jazz and Classical.. Jazz just takes a few instruments and hell sometimes just one. Classical takes quite a few but doesn't touch the synthy stuff. It would be cool if Yamaha just started included a MegaVoice set on their PSR line, and not have it that someone has to shell out thousands of dollars just to get the 10 megavoices they want....

Squeak

In my case it depends on what I'm doing. My own music includes some synth oriented progressive rock, along with jazz fusion and experimental stuff, so I use much more than 20 voices, and demand that they be fully editable. The PA80 allows me a lot of editing power, but it lacks the sliders and real time controls I need on those occasions when I want to be able to modify a sound in real time. In those cases, I go to the Motif. Quality of the voices hasn't been a big issue for me in any of my more recent boards. They've pretty much all been acceptable. Ability to edit synth type voices has been the bigger issue for me. When a real quality acoustic voice is needed and none of my boards can cut it, I go to my sample based software anyway. Then there is also a lot of tweaking involved including using physical modeling tools. The good news is that I really enjoy the tweaking aspect anyway.

On the other hand, for live play, I doubt I ever use 20. The priority shifts a bit from complicated programming to focusing on my playing and entertaining skills.

AJ



[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 10-01-2002).]

Hey,

What about a "Sweet" expansion card for the PSR9000 PRO

Midnite

Or a sweet and mega module?
Terry

Interesting.

For "live" playing I also use a limited number of voices (about 20).

When creating / tweaking midifiles I also use the Cakewalk voice editor to audition / select from the full list, so there's a lot more variations used there.

However, in Midi file edits I sometimes find it necessary to use controllers, RPN and NRPN data to adjust the sounds I use. Not often, but it happens.

So if someone comes up and says "Heres a keyboard with 30 sounds but they're all magnificent and totally editable" I might be tempted

Except I dont have time to edit very much...

And (as has been discussed elsewhere on this forum) for midi file playback you don't want standout voices, you want voices that fit together without one thing dominating. You need the "wow" factor for lead voices.

The facility to build your own perfect set of keyboard voices is to a degree already available at the higher end of the arranger market. Its called sampling! However, as a live player I have always steered clear of sampling because (a) I'm basically lazy and (b) it takes a lot of effort (or money) to get a set of samples for a voice which are of better quality than those built into the waveform ROM on modern keyboards.

You do get the impression sometimes that the hundreds of voices available are just slight variations of a theme; its a bit like those handheld video games with "1296 games" which are just 5 games with lots of slight variations (like number of aliens, difficulty level etc etc). I usually find theres about 3 games I actually like so the rest can go fly. Of course the wife likes a different 3 games.....

This is exactly what Yamaha have been doing, hence the Sweet!, Live!, Cool! and now Mega! voices. There's always a pallete of sounds to cater for all tastes and genres, but usually in a performance the performer will focus on a handful of good solo and ensemble voices which will become that players "trait". I think Yamaha have done an excellent job in giving us a generous range of excellent voices, plus plenty of other very useable sounds should we require them. Everyone has their own tastes, be it a nice piano, a good guitar, nice electric pianos or organs. It used to be the case that you would choose a keyboard because it had ONE of these very good sounds, and thats how you made your mind up. Now we are spoilt for choice, because almost all the sounds are great! For what its worth, I'd like more synth sounds, more synth pads especially given that its a keyboard.. but I am not complaining at the ones that are provided.

Simon


------------------
________________________
Simon G.K. Williams
simon@svpworld.com
Creative Music & Multimedia
http://www.svpworld.com
________________________