Making Music

[Aquarius]

Hi everyone! I'm mainly a macOS software developer, but I have a hobby of creating/recording instrumental pop songs.  My usual process with my PSR-S770 (and the PSR-S700 I had before it) was to use the built in multi-track sequencer and styles. Save the songs to a USB flash drive. Transfer that to my iMac.  Drag the MIDI files into GarageBand.  Reassign instruments (because GarageBand doesn't have the same instruments or sometimes gets thing completely wrong).  And then visually do any editing or mixing there.  It is a long process and I'm not so great at mixing so I started to build up this backlog of songs. There are others, but one problem is that there are some instruments that just sound better on the PSR-S770 than what GarageBand can do... not so much the quality of the sound itself but how it adapts to how you play and creates more realism (in some of the saxophone sounds for example) and so I was never quite happy with the end result.

Even though I've had the PSR-S770 for some time now (long enough for some of the style variation buttons to start to go - which was a problem with my PSR-S700 as well).  I never actually played with the new audio recording feature on the keyboard and so recently decided to experiment a bit with it.  The experiment went well and I found that I can rather easily export a single instrument track from a MIDI sequencer recording with it and then could import that audio into GarageBand to mix along with the other software instruments.  That is going to be cool...  but still will take a while and this is just a hobby.

But while I was experimenting with the audio recording feature I just decided to play one of my songs live as a solo piano piece (using the Live! Grand Piano instrument sound). It turned out pretty well.  Something of a departure from my normal process, but this was fun.  There was no editing, no mixing,  just the audio recording as I played it.  So I recorded another one of my songs like that... and another... and another... and well... I soon found that I had recorded all 77 songs I've written (so far). There are some mistakes here or there (tried to keep them to a minimum and on some of the songs recorded several times over to get something I was happy with).  Some of the timing might be off a bit.  But I had such a blast.  So I thought I would share them with you.  They can be found here:

https://soundcloud.com/mike-yenco/sets/collection-piano-edition

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did creating them.  I love this keyboard (well except for the style variation buttons wearing out over time). I still plan to get back to the multi-track mixing stuff at some point, but that could be a while as I'm currently trying to learn a new programming language and developer tool for my work (which pays the bills unlike my hobby).

I do also have a question.  Does anyone know if there is a macOS app available through the Mac App Store that can enable visually editing the midi data similar to GarageBand BUT... then save it as midi that it can be played back through the PSR-S770 with the various instruments assignments it was recorded with intact?

[s_cristi]

Hello Aquarius!

I must say I love the new features of the PSR S770 (owned a PSR 3000 before).
I mostly plug in the smartphone in the Line In, play some YT piece and just play whatever instrument(sound) I like over the original music.
All this gets recorded effortless in a wav... just awesome!

https://soundcloud.com/s_cristi/ce-har-ap-copyright

Also tried recording multi-track audio to the PC, here is where the work gets serious but I prefere these to midi multi-track.

Cheers!

[Aquarius]

I'm rather torn between the two.  I mean, there are so many awesome styles, the option to make minor adjustments (add or remove a note, move a note because you didn't play the intended one or because the timing is slightly off in an otherwise perfect take), to have such control to craft the song to make it sound like it does in my head when I came up with it makes the MIDI data very desirable to me as does building up a richer sound with several instruments in multiple tracks.  But at the same time, the styles bring with them a certain rigidity. Changing the tempo during a performance, changing timing within a song (for example, blending back and forth between a 4 / 4 and 3 / 4 within a song... these are things that are easy just playing and doing an audio recording as a solo piano piece but are somewhat problematic (especially when dropped into GarageBand which expects a consistent timing).  Is there even a way to create a style that has variations with such different timings?  Are there any existing styles out there that pull this off?  With so many styles to choose from, there is also sometimes a difficulty in picking one (or even finding the one that most closely matches what I'm hearing in my head).  There are so many times I'm saying... yeah, a beat like that song I heard in Melodifestivalen a couple of years ago...  or that arpeggio similar to that song by this Swedish artist I like and... there are no direct styles linked to that particular song around.  And then you have to go digging and listening to various styles until you find something at random and say... oh, that's it!... this style is what I'm looking for... what a weird name... never would have guessed it would be called this... or even mix and match between a few different styles... or even create or add your own parts to a style.  It is definitely a LOT more involved.

[Ed B]

Hi
Why not try using registrations.  With registrations you can really make use of all the capabilities of your keyboard.
Regards
Ed B

[Aquarius]

I got a bit discouraged by registrations when I moved from my PSR-S700 to the PSR-S770 and almost none of them (and I had made quite a lot on the PSR-S700) worked correctly anymore... and now with my PSR-S770 starting to act up on the style variation buttons I'm starting to wonder how long it will be before I just have to get whatever Yamaha's latest keyboard is to replace it and if I have to do another migration, is it really worth creating a bunch of registrations that will just all go haywire again?

I'm also not sure which concern the registrations would address.  In terms of changing the tempo, I'm thinking of a gradual slowing down or speeding up as I play.  A registration would simply jump directly to the faster or slower tempo no?  Or was this registration suggestion a way to switch between the different timing in a song with two styles instead of trying to put different timing into a single style as variations?  Hmmm... I suppose that might work... but I would have to find, merge existing styles, or create two styles from scratch (I'm not very good at creating them from scratch) that would blend together (same instruments just with the different timing) or it would sound very disjointed. If that's the solution here...  do you (or anyone here?) know of any sort of faster paced pop/rock sounding 3 / 4 styles with a good drum beat/bass?  There are plenty of 4 / 4 styles like that I could choose from, but all the 3 / 4 styles I've heard seem to be a slower paced waltz style with almost non-existent drums and bass.

[Ed B]

Hi
You can convert registrations from one keyboard to another using Murray Best's Registration Manger
http://psrtutorial.com/util/best.html
Regards
Ed B

[Aquarius]

Sounds nice.  Um...  .msi  I'm not sure what that is.  Guessing some Windows extension?  I'm on a Mac.