MIDI Playback With Harmony

[Michael Trigoboff]

I recorded a Cubase MIDI track of myself playing single note melody. I wanted to play it back through the Genos with keyboard harmony happening.

I discovered that you can actually do this: you have to set MIDI Receive to Keyboard for the MIDI channel, which in my situation was Right1's channel, Port1, Ch1.

[EileenL]

Keyboard Harmony follows what the Left hand chords are playing to produce the right hand harmony.

[Michael Trigoboff]

Keyboard Harmony follows what the Left hand chords are playing to produce the right hand harmony.

I wasn't playing the keyboard, though. I was using Cubase to send MIDI to the Genos.

I had previously recorded MIDI from the Genos style, with the Genos controlled by the Chord Looper.

Then, with my backup band recorded, I played lead as single notes. When I played that recorded lead into Port1 Ch1 with that channel set to Keyboard, my lead played back through the Right 1 voice, with harmony when I had Keyboard Harmony turned on. When I played that recorded lead into Port1 Ch3 with that channel set to Right2, my lead played back through the Right 2 voice. No harmony was available in this situation when I had Keyboard Harmony turned on, but I didn't want it for the Right 2 voice. (The chart on page 75 of the Reference Manual shows the correspondence between MIDI channels and Genos parts. I followed that scheme for consistency, but I actually may not have needed to.)

I had Right 1 set to an electric piano voice, and Right 2 set to an electric guitar. I had one MIDI track for the electric piano and another track for the electric guitar.

You can hear what it sounded like by listening to this mp3.

Next up: vocals, including harmony generayed by the Genos,

[jwyvern]

When you set to Keyboard that channel behaves as if the received midi was sent by playing the keyboard, or any additional connected keyboard, even if you are not (as in this case from a DAW). Hence features like harmony can be turned on and since LH chord data had already been recorded, so is available for the song, the harmony will follow it.
John

[Michael Trigoboff]

The LH MIDI input data wasn't recorded. What was recorded was MIDI channels 9-16, as played by the style in response to the Chord Looper.

I'm assuming that the harmony generator picked up the chords from the style's recorded MIDI output, since the Chord Looper was not active when I recorded the lead part. At that point, I also had ACMP turned off.

[jwyvern]

What was recorded was MIDI channels 9-16, as played by the style in response to the Chord Looper.

When a style is recorded as part of normal song recording the chord info is available eg. During playback of the midi you can select a different style on the KB and it will play (instead of the original recorded channels) and  will follow the recorded chord sequence.

John

[Michael Trigoboff]

Here's what I did: with the style playing under control of the Chord Looper, I played single notes for the lead. I recorded all of this as MIDI in Cubase. I did not have the Genos record it.

There is no chord information in any of the MIDI tracks produced by the style. There is chord information in the MIDI track (channel 1) produced by my playing. The chord information is there in the form of Sy*** messages as described on page 111 of the Genos Data List PDF, of the form:

F0 43 7E 02 -- -- -- -- F7.

These Sy*** messages are typically close to but not exactly at the beginning of each bar, e.g. 13.1.1.42.

The chord information in that track works fine for creating lead harmony based on those chords. But if I just play that one track from Cubase into the Genos, the chords do not control the style properly.

At this point, I feel like I may have gone a bit deeper than "scratching the surface," but there still seem to be great depths below where I currently am.

If anyone's interested, I can make the MIDI file available here.