Why I like Yamaha philosophy: mode less operation

[voodoo]

My opinion is, that Yamaha has a focus on highly usable user interface. What do I mean?

First, this appeared for arrangers. While Korg PA Series separates modes like Style, Song, Voice, Yamaha offers just one mode, where styles and songs and voices can be played all together. This is one reason, why I decided for PSR against PA arranger.

Now, they carried on this philosophy over to the synth world. Where all synths until now were separating voice mode and multi mode, the Montage and now the MODX offer a mode less operating mode. All patches are just performances containing one or more parts.

In earlier times only voices could use full DSP power. That was the case for early Yamaha synths (I had a TG 500 Module of the SY 55 synth) and is still the case for Korg synths. In multi mode, the effect parameters of only one voice could be used. But now we have enough DSP power to play several voices with full DSP support at the same time. So it was a good decision of Yamaha to eliminate the separation of voice and multi mode. Now we have only performances, and each part of the performance can use full DSP power at the same time.

Another new concept is the super knob. For Korg keyboards, you can control every synth parameter by any keyboard control. This is very flexible, but there is no abstract concept. Now Montage and MODX offer so-called assignable knobs which can be configured to control any parameter of the synth engine. And the super knob can be used to control up to 8 of there assignable knobs at once. So they introduced an abstraction layer they helps to manage complex dependencies.

So I like the Yamaha concepts very much.

[Joe H]

I agree with your point of view.  Yes, Yamaha had used different "Modes" even with their high end XG sound modules... XG Mode, TG300B Mode, and Performance Mode.  This was very confusing to me when I first bought these instruments.  Even now with my MU128 which has 3 XG plug-in cards (VL, AN and DX) I must choose which Mode I want the instrument to be in.  Performance allows layering of up to 4 Voices and uses up to 5 DSPs plus Master EQ.  I'm at a point of thinking maybe I will buy an MU1000 so I can have 200 performances. One with Performances made up of the best sounds from the Preset Voices in the box and the other with Performances made up of patches with the 3 plug-in synth engines.

I'm beginning to think that 200 (favorite) programmed Performances tweaked to my satisfaction would be better than 2400 plain vanilla sounds. The 2400 Voices I'm referring to are the combined stock Preset sounds, the VL sounds, the Analog sounds and FM sounds.

Joe H

[EugeneM]

I imagine you could really get a lot out of the instrument if know what you're doing and you can tweak 200 programmed performances to your liking. I can't wait til I'm able to do stuff like that. Right now I'm satisfied with the basics.