Record style part from external midi?

[pzandvoort]

Has anyone been able to play midi from a DAW into the onboard Style Creator?

I know I can make the entire style in Sonar, save as midi, convert to style, transfer to Genos, etc. But it's a fairly lengthy process and doesn't exactly allow for a quick play-through of the style to see how what I made behaves "in real life".

Optimally I'd like to record a style part in Sonar, do my editing there, go to the Genos style creator, press record on the proper part and have the DAW play the part into the style. Besides the obvious midi clock settings, this "should" be easy: have the DAW play on the right channel and the style creator should record it. Conceptually, this should be no different than using an external midi keyboard to record a style part. In practice, I'm getting the weirdest results. From transposed notes to semi-random controllers to nothing at all.

Anyone?

Peter

[Pino]

Hi Peter

This is what Yamaha say in their brochure,

Cubase
Cubase is one of the most popular digital audio workstations of our time. With Cubase, you can record your performance into separate MIDI tracks then arrange and edit the playing data after you recorded into Cubase.

makes it sound like the real deal, but not so in real life.

Pino


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[pzandvoort]

Hi Pino,

That part actually seems to work - recording a live performance or track-by-track from Genos into the DAW works well enough. Playback is a little more laboreous as you have to setup quite a few controllers and quite a bit of sy*** manually. The integration could be (a lot) better, but it does all seem to work reasonably. Especially when you do track-by-track.

I just can't figure out how to properly send external midi data into Genos' onboard style creator.

Peter

[tyrosaurus]

Hi Peter,

On my Tyros4 the default settings in the MIDI template for receiving MIDI on MIDI port A/USB assigns each MIDI channel to a Song part. Fom the Genos Reference Manual, it looks as if it is the same for Genos.

When recording from the keyboard into Style Creator, it always uses the Right1 keyboard part.

Have you tried opening the MIDI Receive settings and either assigning the channel that you are transmitting the MIDI from the DAW to Right1 instead of a Song part, or changing the transmit channel on your DAW to match the currently set Genos MIDI Receive channel for Right1?

I don't know if this will work but it might be worth trying if you haven't already done so.

You should also make sure that the Genos is set up to receive Sy*** (System page, page 2).

Genos MIDI template settings are described starting from page 132 of the 'Genos Reference Manual' which is not supplied with the keyboard, but can be downloaded from your local Yamaha Support website.   Here is a link for the page on the UK site that contains the document...   https://uk.yamaha.com/en/support/manuals/index.html?l=en&c=keyboards&k=Genos


Regards

Ian   

[pzandvoort]

Ian -

Your comment definitely got me started in the right direction. Thanks for that!
By default, Genos indeed maps MIDI-A ch1-16 to Song parts, just like you said. MIDI-B looks like this:
ch1 - Keyboard
ch2 - Right1
ch3 - Right2
ch4 - Right3
ch5 - Left
ch6 - Extra part1
ch7 - Extra part2
ch8 - Extra part3
ch9 - Style Rhythm1
ch10 - Style Rhythm2
ch11 - Style Bass
ch12 - Style Chord1
ch13 - Style Chord2
ch14 - Style Pad
ch15 - Style Phrase1
ch16 - Style Phrase2

So I made a single track in the DAW and had it play out of ch2 - I'll be darned: it records just fine in the style creator! Interestingly, ch1 ("keyboard") also works, which seems to truly represent what the keys on the keyboard are doing rather than the individual Right1,Right2,Right3,Left parts. I kinda like that concept.

This is where it gets fun... when you're recording a part in the style creator things are great until you get to the end of loop. At that point it starts transmitting what you've already recorded. Makes sense, but I didn't think of it. Note that (by default) the style parts are transmitted on MIDI-A instead of MIDI-B. Of course, I had the DAW set to Omni In and forced MIDI-B/ch1 out and thus it loops! This gets to be a real mess with the all the sy*** and controllers in the style. As it is, when you record a part from the style creator into the DAW, you get all the initial controllers and sy***. The style creator doesn't take kindly to playing that back, even into a "blank" part. The solution lies somewhere in a combination of midi-thru/monitor in the DAW, local on/off on Genos and event filtering, but I have yet to find the magic incantation that makes it quick to round-trip between the style creator, recordings in the DAW and back to the style creator.

Thanks, at least, for the proper channel pointer!

Peter

[Darius]

Hi Peter,
as far as I have understood from the previous posts, you have succeeded in feeding the Style Creator in Genos by playing tracks from Cubase, right?
What about the other way round: getting the data from Style Creator recorded by the sequencer. Does it work as well?
If yes, one could "upload" (live record) an existing style into the external sequencer, modify the musical data, and "download" (live record) into the Style Creator of Genos.
I like this method, it provides freedom for editing (on the sequencer) while not having to bother about the complex structure of the Yamaha Style file, which remains all the time in Genos.

A prerequisite anyway is the MIDI clock synchronisation between Genos and the external sequencer.
I am wondering if Cubasis on IPAD would also do the job. The current App (version 2.6) can only send a MIDI Clock signal, not receive.
Which settings have you used to synchronise the MIDI clocks please?

Regards,
Darius

[pzandvoort]

Hi Darius,

Basically: Yes, you can do that. But it's pretty messy.
- You can (of course) press play while you're in the style creator and live-record that into the DAW. Just realize that the style loops so you'll probably have to remove some extra stuff at the end of your recording.
- You also do the reverse: press record in the style creator and 'play' what's in your DAW back into the style creator. But this is where the mess comes in. Since the style creator works track-by-track, you must do this track-by-track. The style creator only records from ch1 or ch2, so you must set the DAW to send the track you want to 'transfer' on that channel. This is a real pain as none of the sounds will match! Plus you have to do it 8 times for a full style part. More interestingly, when you originally recorded from the style creator into the DAW, the style creator sends all kinds of sy*** at the beginning. Depending on your DAW, this could be very challenging to deal with. Then there's the matter of clocking: no matter what I try, I cannot get the style creator to 100% sync to the DAW.

Personally, I like creating my styles on the keyboard itself, since you can go back-and-forth quickly between actually playing your style and seeing how it deals with chord changes, and editing. However, the editing functionality in the style creator are pretty limited so it would be nice to SOMETIMES edit "on the big screen". In the end I found myself spending more time on figuring out how to properly transfer between DAW and Genos than actually making music, so I gave up.

You're better off creating the entire style in your DAW (that structure isn't too bad - a few bars for Intro1, a few for Intro2, a few for Intro3, then MainA, MainB, etc... You can easily find this on the internet), save it as a midi file and then use a utility to add the technical pieces that tell the keyboard how to play this as a style. It needs to know what kind of transposition rules to apply, what the high/low notes how, how to deal with chords that change while notes are sounding (think a pad/strings, for instance), etc. Mixmaster from Michael Bedesem is pretty good, but for ultimate control you'll really want to become familiar with Jørgen Sørensen's utilities. I haven't tried Stylemagic YA, but people seem to have good luck with that as well.

With Jørgen's utilities, you can basically take an existing style and split it into two pieces: the midi file and the technical stuff. You can then edit the midi file in your DAW, save it, and then merge the technical stuff back in to create a valid style file.

You can also just open a .sty file as a midi file in your DAW (just rename it to .mid if you have to). You'll loose all the technical stuff, but you can see the structure.

Hope this helps,

Peter

[Wim NL]

Styles do have more tracks than 8 channels  (9 / 16)

[Seagull29]

Hi,
Yes, a style can use more than midi channel 9 to 16 !
if anyone feels the courage to translate this little tutorial, here's how to directly transfer an instrumental part to make a style from a DAW to Style Creator. And it works very well. I also add a tutorial to optimize the styles with CASM Editor.
Happy reading and good WE

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