Re: [LAU] A Bach in appology and completeness :-)

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Julien Claassen <julien@c-lab.de> wrote:
> Hello Niels!
>  Yes, I think the AN1X is a good device for its price. It was the first
> virtual analogue synth I owned. and I had fun with it. :-)
>  Yet the CS series? Really! My friend had a CS2X and it was... funny! :-) We
> liked to play it if we wanted to have a laugh. :-)

Once you can get at the VLSI, I think it's more than a laugh. It's
serious synthesis power (including effects and importantly,
tempo-integrated effects on a per-track basis) encapsulated in a
standard Yamaha XG format MIDI file, as evidenced by, the publicly
available XG tracks that I rendered for demonstration purposes on the
db60xg (NEC XR385), as posted earlier:
http://www.megatrade.ru/Midi/Isummer.zip -->
http://nielsmayer.com/npm/Intelligent_Summer.ogg
Skyline\ -\ Herbie\ Hancock\ -\ TG300B.mid (
http://www.blueman.name/Jazz.php ) -->
http://nielsmayer.com/npm/Skyline_Herbie_Hancock_TG300B.ogg ...

To get these devices out of "toy" mode, you need to send the device an
appropriate sysex to put it into TG300B mode. Or you use Rui Nuno
Capela's QXGEdit ( http://qxgedit.sourceforge.net ) or the windows
XGEdit ( http://www.yamahamusicsoft.com/en/product/1017294 ).

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr04/articles/xgmasterclass.htm is a
good article on what can be done -- nothing groundbreaking, just basic
synthesis, but now available for a total of $10.00, hosted by a
variety of linux-supported cheap&used ICE1712/1724 soundcards && a
free PCI slot, using custom, mass-production, VLSI chips consisting of
an AWM2 synthesizer chip and three 24-bit DSPs -- the entire digital
portion are big chips, (c) Yamaha 1995, supposedly the same chips used
on their synths from the same time-period, aka CS1X, AN1X, etc.

http://www.soundonsound.com/soundbank/YamahaXG.php
are good examples, both audio and MIDI done using the XG standard.

> But I like to play the Tyros keyboards if I come
> across them and I'd like to buy one, if I could have them just with the
> sounds, maybe even minus the effects, I can do them on my Linux box. :-)

That's exactly where having such a synth-board or an MU-series
tone-generator might actually come in useful for you. The XG Standard
starts out with an extensive, but well-organized set of standard
English names for all the voices, which you could access via
screenreader or enter as text. With that sonic frame of reference,
just about any parameter can be tweaked extensively, and recorded as
part of the performance. With per-channel controllable time-sync'd
effects

Because it's a wide-use standard, some of the opensource programs such
as http://qtractor.sourceforge.net and
http://kmetronome.sourceforge.net/ make use of existing Yamaha XG
Cakewalk instrument definitions (*.ins) files -- if that's handled in
the underlying libraries (drumstick?), perhaps a text-based
midi-editor might allow you to directly select. from a given
instrument definition, the"patch names" and voices from the XG set and
automatically set voicing per-midi track -- handling up to 16, or 32,
simultaneous voices, w/ 16 parallel effects, all real-time
controllable, e.g. potentially with sliders or drawbars on a control
surface.

The Yamaha MU series might give you this capability: some of the
cheaper earlier ones (
http://homepage.mac.com/synth_seal/html/mu10.html ) and the
db50xg/db60xg have very little UI and are expected to be controlled by
software. The fancier one that can host PLG card-synth that I pointed
out has an extensive LCD and many buttons and a jog-wheel, and several
modal-editor-looking status-lights that might not be very helpful to
you... ( http://cgi.ebay.com/YAMAHA-MU-128-XG-Sound-Module-QY-SU-Motif-VL-WX-PLG-RY-/300439559975
)... though underlying, would be the same level of external control.

Niels
http://nielsmayer.com
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Received on Wed Jun 23 08:15:01 2010