Someone please clarify:
1) To access the new sounds/styles from this program, do you need external hardware?
2) I see a tablet in one picture. Do you make all you selections on the tablet, and never touch the keyboards buttons? Seems awkward, if that's the case.
3) Is the Groovy program playing itself, or the internal sounds of the Yamaha host? What do you hook up to audio amps?
Our software runs on any Windows 10 PC (desktop, laptop, tablet) and interacts with a Yamaha arranger only through MIDI (usually a USB cable connecting the PC with the arranger).
The sound is generated within the arranger (using the arranger's voices and DSPs) and can be heard through the arranger's built-in speakers and/or through its audio out jacks.
In practice instead using the aging 20+ years old Yamaha style playing engine (running on a CPU within your arranger), we use our own (hopefully better) software algorithms to replace Yamaha's firmware.
Both our software and Yamaha's own firmware send midi commands to the built-in Yamaha chips in charge of actually producing the sound. We use the midi commands documented in the Data List that comes with your arranger.
You have 3 ways to interact with our software:
1) Touch native UI (i.e.: your fingers touching the tablet's screen). EVERYTHING can be done only with your fingers if you wish.
2) Mouse and keyboard connected to the PC. Optional. A bluetooth wireless mouse that augments a tablet touch screen is a killer combination, that boosts enormously your productivity.
3) Up to 4 physical midi devices (keyboards, pedalboards, control surfaces) connected via MIDI (USB cable) to your PC. You can map almost ANY command to any physical switch, knob, pedal, button, key, ..., available on the connected physical devices. Bindings
howto. More in depth discussion, about the merits and synergy of the various options,
here.
Unfortunately ANY Yamaha arranger, irrespective of price, has a totally dumb midi implementation (do you remember the 20+ year old firmware, the lack of audio over USB, not being MIDI class compliant, ... ?) and does NOT send out exploitable midi data (i.e.: CC messages) when you push its buttons.
Even worse, every time you push a button the firmware changes the internal state of the sound engine,
EVEN if you set midi local control to off (one of the MANY bugs we have discovered during the development of our software and we had to sidetrack).
So you'd better forget about it, do not touch any button, and use only the black and white keys of your arranger. It is a pity since all those buttons right above the arranger keyboard would have been quite handy to use!
All these limitations and lack of features that in 2020 everybody thinks are granted even on cheap devices, are a testament of the 30 years old design living within your Yamaha arranger, they never bothered to upgrade to modern standards.
In other market segments, where the competition is stiffer, things have gone differently (compare what you get - bang from the buck - from a ~1k€ MODX6 vs a ~4k€ Genos).
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