Same poor Leslie simulation

[Amwilburn]

Dear Jim,

When I got Genos1, I tried to reproduce the best patches I had achieved on my CVP309PE, including the organ ones with the use of Rotary 5 effect, the most realistic available, in my opinion.
To get this result, I scrupulously checked all the many parameters involved.

BUT, i don't know why, on Genos the organ patches that were quite nice on the Clavinova, sound different (worst). The main difference is in the depth feeling.
I'm not enough aware of the technical matters to may answer why.

Anyway, if you apply the Rotary 5 (in Genos 1 you find it under Legacy effects), you will immediately notice a nice increase in depth of the sound.

Ciao,

Angelo

Correct, *all* the CVP309's voices are in the Genos already (except for the natural strings, the solo Cello, and Grand Piano 1). Most of them are in Legacy, also correct.

Oh I didn't even realize that was you playing in the 2nd video; *great* playing Angelo!

Mark

[Duffy]

Duffy, I think you missed his point. He is not saying no-one played quality instruments many years ago. Stradivarius violins and Bosendorfer pianos and quality organs have been around for hundreds of years, Fender, Hoffman and others like them have been making quality guitars for decades. I believe his point is that good music gets produced by good musicians EVEN when the instruments are not perfect.
Mike

I agree,  That's perfectly true and the musician is always more important to the performance than the instrument he plays.
We all know a good musician can make a poor instrument sound much better,  whilst a poor musician still doesn't sound really good even on a top class instrument.
This still does not detract from the fact that a musician will always want to play on the best quality instrument available to him, and sound quality will always be very important.
Playing an instrument with a really beautiful sound will always open a special kind of door to entrancement for a musician, which playing poor instruments will never do.

[Duffy]

Thank you @mikf, that's exactly what I meant. Maybe I didn't point out right, that's my english teachers fault

I'm sorry if I made you feel uncomfortable due to my misunderstanding and maybe English not being your first language  ( which never occurs to me ).
I do agree with the gist of what you're saying, and that the musician is more important than the instrument.  We all still want better and better instruments though,  don't we ?
Best wishes mate

[Amwilburn]

I kindly disagree with that:
1st -this problem remains if we turn off additional effects and is also present in styles where additional effects can't really be applied.
2nd -I think we all agree that Korg also uses DSP (if that would be the reason) and still, there's no SSS problem as far I know.

In my opinion, the problem is in the way Yamaha OS handles voices and that hasn't been changed in at least last two decades. Nowadays there's simply no excuse for having SSS problem.

Bogdan

Bogdan, using the new Korg PA5X *is* an example of SSS to strive for (Roland also achieved SSS way back with the FantomX in 2010). I get a lot of behind the scenes as a dealer who started in this business in the 70's

And specifically to address the complaints of non SSS back in T4 at the time (these complaints have been going on almost a quarter of a century); Roland specificlaly said to avoid the pops and sudden volume swells from changing patches, they doubled the number of DSP's (in other words, they had 1 set for active voices and 1 set of dsp's for previously held voices). I can't remember what they said about clearing the sample buffer, unfortunately (that press conferance / product rollout was almost 15 years ago now).

It didn't actually matter, since the Fantom X wasn't an arranger; but additionally, it turned out you had to edit the patch to remove DSP's

https://support.roland.com/hc/en-us/articles/201960479-Fantom-S-Fatnom-S88-Fantom-X-series-How-Do-I-Keep-a-Patch-Sounding-While-Selecting-a-New-One-

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/roland-fantom-x6-patch-sounding-selecting-new-one/

And having played all brands of keyboards for almost 5 decades now, prior to large sample days and voices with multi DSP's, they were *all* SSS.


I hope one of these days you get to sit in on a saxophone recording session, and you can see in person what I said about the spittle causing a crackling soudn. Has nothing to do with recording. I checked the PA5x, and they have that on some of the saxes as well. Once you hear it in person, you'll know it's not a digital recording error (although you could certainly call it a recording technique error, as all they'd have to do is wait for the condensation to dry out and re-record that one note).

It is *not* just the DSPs, no. Even on a Genos, you can switch 2 patches without any DSP's and in many cases, you'll still get an audible click.
There's a 3rd thing; sample volume playback (each voice has an internal volume playback level, if you click on the voice edit).

But even removing DSP's, and levelling volumes, it's much *closer* to seamless, but still not quite perfect. Derek is correct in his assumption that the larger more memory intensive sounds are the issue. I'll do a quick video on a G1 and show you what I mean.


I'm *not* saying Yamaha shouldn't do SSS. I'm absolutely baffled that they didn't on the G2 after Korg did on the PA5x. I'm also baffled they didn't put the new Rotary sim from the YC into the G2.


All I'm saying is compare apples to apples.

Mark

[ton37]

I appreciate your sincere response @Duffy and it is true: we share our passion with music and musical instruments

[Amwilburn]

here's the quick vid I threw together (yes I'm wearing gloves).


https://drive.google.com/file/d/12MJ_mIjaWqqf50g_0Y-sO7UhEZoZvwq8/view?usp=sharing

Registration 1 and 2, different internal volumes for the voices (I used CFX grand an Kinostrings) and different levels of reverb causes quite a big click.

Registration 3 and 4: I volume levelled and removed the dsps. At least as much as I could, you hear me tapping the strings at the end because it turns out? Even with all DSP's off, the Kino Strings have reverb baked into the sample?!!

Going from reg 3 to reg 4 is completely seamless, but going back there's a slight hiccup because of the reverb I can't remove and the large samples involved.


*not in video* I then tried it with seattle strings, and you can completely take the reverb off. completely seamless switching with Kino strings once volume levelled, still not quite perfect on the CFX (as Derek & I suspected, the largest samples in this case the CFX do cause a slight hiccup clearing and refilling the buffer ram), but really really close.

then the last 25 seconds I mess aroudn with the jazz standard  drawbar organflutes  from page one of G1, unmodified. The rotary fast slow is odd because it defaults to the touch screen for fast/slow, but i set it to the pedal on registration 5, so that i continue playing with the rotary speed up & slow down for the remainder of the 1 minute video.

Hope this helps explain some of the wall of text I posted,

cheers!

Mark

[BogdanH]

hi Mark,
I'm sure we generally agree on SSS issue. Actually I'm not interested to know why Yamaha doesn't/can't fix this... this issue simply shouldn't exist IMO.
Yes, there are tricks how to make SSS glitch less noticeable by adjusting voice parameters, choosing different voices (combination), adapting our playing or style, etc. But in a nutshell, that means we need to make compromises that otherwise wouldn't be necessary.
I'm a home/amateur player and so this issue alone isn't a deal breaker for me (albeit it's annoying). But we know how it is: a little problem here and a big/little problem there,.. things sum's up and one starts looking elsewhere.

Greetings,
Bogdan

[Amwilburn]

hi Mark,
I'm sure we generally agree on SSS issue. Actually I'm not interested to know why Yamaha doesn't/can't fix this... this issue simply shouldn't exist IMO.
Yes, there are tricks how to make SSS glitch less noticeable by adjusting voice parameters, choosing different voices (combination), adapting our playing or style, etc. But in a nutshell, that means we need to make compromises that otherwise wouldn't be necessary.
I'm a home/amateur player and so this issue alone isn't a deal breaker for me (albeit it's annoying). But we know how it is: a little problem here and a big/little problem there,.. things sum's up and one starts looking elsewhere.

Greetings,
Bogdan

We are in complete agreement, as usual; this wasn't to excuse or bypass the problem. I was merely answering people why older keyboards don't have this issue. People citing other brands, but in fact all brands didn't have this issue 23 years ago. And Roland actually *did* answer it with the Fantom X, 13 years ago (*correction, 2004, nearly 20 years ago), but again, as shown in the related links, you had to first edit the patch to do patch remain, and remove all specialized DSP's; I believe patch remain forced the patch to keep the same reverb as the previous patch, rather than the one that it's supposed to use. Kind of like a registration freeze for reverb

Which is why DSP's were a *huge* part of this new issue. Roland even flat out said so.

I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to make smooth registration transitions.
But apples to apples, *nobody* did before 2002.

[ton37]

Do you still have your gloves on @Mark?  For my imaging, is there an example somewhere to see (e.g. from another model/brand) where you don't have this effect, like you just did with the Genos? Tia

[Amwilburn]

Do you still have your gloves on @Mark?  For my imaging, is there an example somewhere to see (e.g. from another model/brand) where you don't have this effect, like you just did with the Genos? Tia

Well, all keyboards (that I've played) pre 2002 have seamless switching; and the Fantom X I mentioned above has been discontinued for a while (it was 2004, not 2010! I must've been thinking of its successor the Fantom G, which was 2008, but we didn't get one til 2009

The only keyboards I have on hand with SSS are Montage and PA5x, everything else 'glitches' when changing patches

[pjd]

After 39 replies, I hope that I can add something new.

Not adding the VCM rotary speaker sim to Genos2 is a big disappointment. I was not considering G2 because 1. I'm in the process of buying a digital piano (which I need) and 2. I skip generations when it comes to electronics. I rarely see a convincing value proposition in a gen+1 product. That said, no VCM rotary is a big hit on the G2 value proposition.

I can't and won't wait for Genos3. As soon as I save enough pennies, I will probably buy a Hammond Suzuki M_solo to replace my Reface YC. Hammond sim, four octaves, no mini-keys, light weight.

Reface YC is not that good. I have played the snot out of it for 5+ years. I detest the rotary high speed and the chorus/vibrato is a pretty bad joke. Now that I regard the Reface YC as "used up" in the economic sense, it's a candidate for replacement.

Yamaha had better get on the ball. I'd love to see Yamaha surprise us with a G2 update.

Peace to all -- pj

[pjd]

SSS...

Many years ago, Yamaha figured out how to combine and intertwine certain aspects of AWM synthesis with effect processing. This combination decreased latency and increased utilization of the DSP effect hardware. This technique is patented.

Broadly speaking, it breaks synthesis into a two stage pipeline:

      Initial synthesis  --->  Final synthesis + effects

If I recall, "Final synthesis" includes filtering, but it's been a while since I read the patent. 

What that means practically, is two separate hardware units need to be kept busy until completion in order to avoid a nasty glitching hiccup.

Montage/MODX accomplishes SSS by restricting Performances to eight (MODX: four) Parts in both the first-sounding Performance and the new second-sounding Performance. This reserves enough hardware resources to let the first-sounding Performance run to completion. (I thinking Yamaha internally call this the "damping point.")

The problem with GenosX, PSR-SXxxx, etc. -- they use the XG voice and effects architecture. Genos has a lot of virtual DSP units, but they are not all dynamically allocated, i.e., the reserve pool is small or non-existent.

Roland, etc. have their own synthesis hardware to worry about. Thus, aside from having SSS or not, I'd rather not make comparisons about how or why Roland, etc. do one thing and Yamaha do something else. Yamaha AWM is what it is...

That's my take -- Peace -- pj