Annoying thing on the Genos

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi

The memory thing that if you twiddle your knobs and faders a little too much you cannot save the settings. Not enough memory!![/i

I have done a song and some of the sounds on the pads use a left and right pan constantly for effect when using them.
I have three pads that do that and with setting the volume levels to get a mix balance I cannot save the settings on the Genos because of the memory.
I do find that annoying.
The only way over a situation like this Is to transport Into Cubase and  adjust and automate.
It would of been nice to have that memory just to adjust a song In the Genos after recording a song before transporting over to Cubase for edits.
Could this thing be Implemented In a Genos update.


All the best
John   

[Joe H]

John,

When you refer to "Pads" are you talking about the Multi Pads?  The Multi Pads use a very small and limited sequencer so that could be the problem.

Joe H

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi Joe
The song I had done In the sequencer of the Genos and used three multipads.

When I go to song recording and put In my song I then play and balance all the channels up .
When I go to save set up It said  not enough memory
It was said that if you do a lot of knob twists and fader moving the memory cannot cope as a small amout of memory allowed for such  movements.
Seems odd to me that you cannot do such a simple task.
If you want to play the song again all faders and knobs go back to your first setting and that Is annoying as you cannot save.


all the Best
john

[Joe H]

John,

I think this is an honest oversight on the part of Yamaha engineers.  The small capacity of the on-board sequencer has been discussed already.  Yamaha should fix this problem and increase the capacity 32,000 MIDI events to 200,000 MIDI events.

I hope they will do this with a firmware update for the Genos and included a much larger sequencer on all future arrangers.  There is a feature on the JL Cooper Fadermaster hardware controller (early 1990s) the will automatically "thin" the data generated by the faders.  I would think that Yamaha could add such a capability to the Genos when recording to the sequencer.

Joe H

[Fred Smith]

Note that the 32k event limit is not unique to Genos. The Tyros line had the same limit. And the limit is likely a function of midi's 8-bit structure, rather than the Yamaha implementation.

The subject of thus thread should really be: The annoying thing about MIDI.

Cheers,
Fred

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi Joe and Fred

Thank goodness for Cubase as That is the place to adjust volume levels and automate.
Surely though Yamaha could update this Genos


All the bets
John

[Joe H]

Note that the 32k event limit is not unique to Genos. The Tyros line had the same limit. And the limit is likely a function of midi's 8-bit structure, rather than the Yamaha implementation...

Cheers,
Fred

Fred,

Correction: MIDI is a 7-bit format (hence the 0 - 127 limitation) For larger data values 2 bytes must be used and there are different ways this is implemented... low to high or high to low and also occasions where bit-packing (8-bit byte) are used when there are a number of switch parameters (On/Off... 1 / 0) that can be included in a single byte.

But there is NO memory limit on the built-in sequencer except what the Yamaha engineers place on it.  For example, the Motif XS and XF have a much larger sequencer, which is about 210,000 note/MIDI event capacity (approx. 1.4 MB).  BTW... this is the same capacity of the legacy Yamaha MDF3 portable sequencer / data filer that uses an HD floppy drive. (1990s)

Joe H

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi Joe

So It Is stalemate again until Yamaha come up with an update or next Genos which is more probable.

Thanks for all your Information, always appreciated


all the best
john

[Lee Batchelor]

You will never see improvements to the Genos MIDI stuff until Yamaha STOPS treating their arrangers like living room toys. They have built amazing sounds and styles into the Genos, and yet they don't want us to have the ability to record effectively - merely little snippets here and there. Anyone who is waiting for this to be fixed with an update is living in a dream world! They won't even send a simple patch through to sort their menus alphabetically - and you think they're going to fix MIDI limitations. Dream on!

Here's what a fly on the wall at a Yamaha marketing meeting would report back to us, "If users want to record seriously, they can darn well buy a Montage, as well!"

[pjd]

Here's what a fly on the wall at a Yamaha marketing meeting would report back to us, "If users want to record seriously, they can darn well buy a Montage, as well!"

I've got to agree, Lee.

The N1 and N2/N3 Owner's Manuals claim that "300KB per song" is "approx. 30,000 notes." The Montage/MODX sequencer claims a capacity of "approx. 130,000 notes,) so Montage/MODX allocates a whopping 1.3MB (!) to its performance sequencer.

In addition to the stench of marketing, I also detect a whiff of legacy software. Yamaha recycles this code like the dickens.

All the best -- pj

P.S. I'm experimenting with a style that makes heavy use of continuous controllers. Them notes/bytes burn fast.

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi PJD

Could Yamaha make It better with an update??
I suppose if you are using a Pad which automates left and right pan quickly It Is burning loads of notes with sweeping back and forth making It like a Georgio moroder beat with a bassy synth.
I had three pads doing that In the jarre song I was doing.
When trying to balance the mix  "No Memory"    ---"Revoloution"!! . I thought I'd put that one In.

Over to Cubase to rectify!!


All the Best
John

[pjd]

Could Yamaha make It better with an update??

Hi John --

Good question.

When I was out and about this morning, I thought of some fan fiction: 

"Once upon a time (1997), there was a company that wrote a very good MIDI sequencer. They put the sequencer in a thing called a QY-70. This sequencer worked very, very well. People could make MIDI songs with 32,000 notes.

Satoshi wrote the MIDI sequencer. Satoshi is a good programmer and he worried about the speed and latency of the sequencer. Satoshi worried a lot because the sequencer ran on an H8 microcontroller -- kind of a slow computer. (This was 1997 after all.)

Satoshi worried so much that he wrote the sequencer in H8 assembler code. He also decided to hard code all of the constants in his nice tight, fast code. This made it hard for anyone else to update his program, which was very reliable. After all, if it isn't broken, don't fix it."

The number of notes, 32,000, is not accidental. It's the capacity of the QY-70 sequencer. 

All the best, John. And so concludes our faerie tale. Good night. 

-- pj

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi Pj


Once Upon a Time heh!!

There Is another   Once Upon a Time  and has a Mr Gold /or Rumpole Stiltskin. He  had a  famous saying  " ALL MAGIC COMES WITH A PRICE"!!!


All the Best
John

[Joe H]

Pj,

I stated the shortcoming of the sequencer on the Genos when it first came out.  I think this is true for the S970 as well. Lets hope they port over the 130,000 note sequencer to the arranger... now with its arpeggiator, Live Control knobs and faders and more complex styles and Multi Pads this is absolutely necessary in my opinion.  It seems they have upgraded everything but the sequencer. As I have already said; I think this is an honest oversight by the Yammie engineers.

Sooner or later they will figure it out.



Joe H

[pjd]

Just so the irony -- or is it sarcasm  -- isn't lost.

The capacity of the sequencer was 32,000 notes in 1997, 21 years ago.

We certainly agree, Joe, except for the words "honest oversight." You're being too kind and civil.

-- pj

[Jay B.]

Just wanted to make sure this got read...

I have an S970. I understand the limitation of the onboard sequencer for recording. Does this also affect playback? Can we load/play a song that has more than 31K notes from a USB Flash Drive?

I was trying to avoid taking a laptop to a gig...ever, if possible

Jay B.

[Normanfernandez]

Are Voice Panning Controls, part of the limit

( 32000). ??

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi
I reckon that voice panning counts as every single millisecond of movement must count as a note.
So panning may take a few hundred notes out.
That to me is a big guess as I am not a expert In computer numbers.
Just a logical guess and I will probably told that i am wrong.
Some panned pads go left and right continously for effect and I am sure that there is something In that which takes up space.
I used three pads which were doing that at the same time as the end of my song progeressed to a finish. Similar to a Kraftwerk /Georgio Moroder sound.
After that tried to save volumes and was told that i had run out of memory. So over to Cubase to sort It out.

All the Best
John

[tyrosaurus]

Hi John,

Although people have been talking about a 'note limit' on Yamaha arranger's Song Recorder (sequencer), there is a limit on the size of the complete recording, which is around 300 KB.  When you load a song into the sequencer, the whole song is loaded into an area of memory reserved for it, so the song must be no larger that this.  All types of MIDI event (including controllers such as 'Pan') add to the size of a song.

If you include controllers such as 'Pan' (CC#10) when recording, a huge number of MIDI events can be produced.  Often the same effect in audible terms can be produced with many less events which uses less space, but you don't seem to get any say in how many are produced over a given range in a given time.

However you can remove (thin out) the excess ones to reduce the size of the file.

If you have Multi Pads which contain a lot of panning events for example, it might be worth looking at them to see if they can be thinned out, especially if they are repeating pads.  This is because if you record them in a MIDI, all of these events will be recorded to the track each time the pad repeats, which could add many potentially unnecessary events to the recording, especially if the pad is running for the whole length of the track!

If you thin out the events in the pads themselves (saving a copy of the modified banks), then when you use them in a MIDI recording, they won't produce so many (surplus) events, which might allow you to complete your song within the 300 KB of the keyboard's sequencer.

You can do this on the keyboard using 'Song Creator' but it is a bit of a pain if there are many to remove!  I don't know if there is a function to automatically 'thin out' controller events in DAWs such as Cubase, but I would be surprised if there isn't.  You can do this in MixMaster for example quite easily.

Are the multi pads that you are using 'presets'?  Which ones are they?

Alternatively post one or more of them and I will look at them to see if they can be 'thinned out' without reducing the overall effect.


Regards

Ian   

[Lee Batchelor]

Ian, would it more productive to record the MIDI pan events in a separate song, and then import them to Cubase to the original project. The tracks should line up if they're the same tempo. At that point, can panning be achieved in the audio track created from the MIDI track? Does Cubase have a pan automation function for its audio tracks? It wouldn't surprise me. Just a thought.

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi
It Is easier to Put Into cubase and do all of your volumes and automation and save that and when back In the Genos all is where It should be.
The pads In question are In the EDM section called Autobahn If you want a fiddle.

All the best
John

[Lee Batchelor]

Thanks, John!

When things slow down on the gigging front, I'm going to buckle down and start an instrumental CD. I have a friend who is an expert on Cubase and mixing. He owes me!

This year, I will have performed 62 gigs with my Genos. It never ceases to amaze me, my fellow musicians, and the audience. Some of the gigs are duets with the full rhythms, while others are as a band member.

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi Lee
Even now that I have the basics, I still rub my head sometimes as no sound comes out and end up having blond moments
I had to write down all the routings from Genos to Focusrite and computer.
The thing is to make a basic template with all routings In Cubase, so you are not left wondering why the track Is not recording etc.
Just a simple little check here and there missed out and It can mess you up.
Now It is getting better and I have got midi to audio recorded In all separate tracks In Cubase.
If you do play a whole song Into the Genos sequencer with registration changes and transport to Cubase all is well.
If several program changes on the lead track just record to wave and slice them and pull down to another audio track in line and then all separate. Lovely having virtual scissors.
That is after all volumes and edits are done to your satisfaction.
This Is where I am at at the moment. Also will have to look at Cubase chordpads. That looks interesting in what you can do with them.
Now I am watching videos on mixing and I am finding that Warren Huart mixing tutorials live and recorded are very helpful.
He makes It look so easy. Things like high and low shelving , EQ ,compression etc and It is all about small moves and not large ones and separating frequencies so they do not clash.
Side chaining seems also a handy trick with bass and kick.
So much to get your head around
Now I have my song In wave format and now for the mix which I can bungle a few times and not destroy the song.
I have as you know been doing cover songs and that Is good for practice, but I do want to get down and produce my own Instrumental soft rock.


all the best
John


All the best
John

[Lee Batchelor]

Wise words, as usual John.

We shouldn't have to jump through all these stupid hoops like circus dogs, just to record what's in our heart. The Genos is a wonderful tool but for some reason, Yamaha has said they don't really want us to get good at using the Genos to create a legacy of our musical thoughts. If their intentions were greater than their appetite for profit, they would have created a DAW or at least a patch file to help us use the Genos with Cubase directly and easily.

What the hell are they afraid of - that we will demonstrate what you can do with a world class arranger, that we can produce heart-warming music for those who love music but can't play themselves, that other people will hear what's possible with the Genos and buy one for themselves? Is this what Yamaha is defending???

At this point, the only thing, other than a healthy gigging schedule, that's preventing me from recording my brains out is the incredible hurtles I must surmount to "simply record." Yes it's possible, but when I must spend 90 percent of my time at the computer with signal routing, bus setups, program changes, sy*** message refinement...that leaves very little time for creativity. As recording musicians, we're not even close to being there yet, but we should have "been there" years ago when the Tyros 1 came out.

Yamaha...stop dragging your feet and stifling the Genos geniuses of the world. You're not part of the solution, which makes you part of the problem!

[Roland]

Are we maybe getting a bit too much worked-up about this? 

For simply recording ideas, the Genos already has plenty of recording features built-in. To record to a DAW for a quick "one-off" Cubase works quite well too if you just record audio.

But once we get to some more sophisticated music productions (that uses MIDI and VST's, obviously) - it (in my opinion) is more than just a quick "one-off". And once we're in Cubase, it doesn't have much to do with the Genos - it is much more work regardless what keyboard you interface with (well except that styles on arrangers and performances on synths are adding a bit more to the learning too).

In my view, it is not the tools that are missing. But we sure could use a better description including videos on how to connect an arranger to Cubase, how to record directly and how to import from the keys to Cubase. Yes, there is plenty about that for audio recording (and tons of VST-how-to's) but when it comes to a mixed production that uses MIDI with a setup of keyboard-audio-interface-Cubase and keys to Cubase with USB; I too find that there should be more tutorials.

Just my 5c :-)

Cheers, Roland

[Lee Batchelor]

Are we maybe getting a bit too much worked-up about this?

Yes, and with good cause.

In my view, it is not the tools that are missing. But we sure could use a better description including videos on how to connect an arranger to Cubase, how to record directly and how to import from the keys to Cubase. Yes, there is plenty about that for audio recording (and tons of VST-how-to's) but when it comes to a mixed production that uses MIDI with a setup of keyboard-audio-interface-Cubase and keys to Cubase with USB; I too find that there should be more tutorials.

Amen to that, bother!

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi Lee and Roland 
The Genos has good sound that does not need a lot fiddling except a bit of eq and shaping.
For me i find the Genos bass settings for style and kick drums much too heavy which can cause mud when you play from out of the box.
The bass is always around 70 volume and i have to tone that down to 38 to 40 to get that to sit right with the drums.
What we need is a mix club section  where everyone interested can share and input.
The Genos is nowhere near a cd production and  you can easily compare the both on the Genos by that horizontal slider ( that is out of the box sounds and a reference track)
Like Lee said, we do not get the full picture and you feel that Yamaha just want us all to make home keyboard sounds with an expensive toy.
With an expensive machine like the Genos all you get is a couple of manuals and videos that are basic operstions which you can pick up from the manuals.
We do not want how to save folders and someone demonstrating songs just fiddling with sliders and knobs etc, we want more in depth tutorials on video.
I have been watching a lot of Warren Huart mixing and you can pick up a lot from his sessions.
Now that I have separated my song In wave format now , I will set up busses and  look at the tracks
I do think though that it is just the bass that I have to sort out as the rest does look good, then It is just boosting the levels up to -3 db.
The other thing Is Lee when you do limiting you have to get over the rms thing with what you hear and a cd level. I will have to look Into that one.
I am still playing around In the dark , but determined to get results. It Is a Flipping great mountain to climb and i am not getting any younger.
I have now got a decent set of AKG 702 openback headphones and Sonarworks headphone reference 4. You can hear the difference straight away.
I may now upgrade that to the Monitor package now.  For the moment I set my monitors up with a SPL meter app to bring each speaker up to 75 db In my listening space. I think they call it calibration.
                                                                                                                                     
Mixmasters out there have sympathy for the minions!!
                                                                                                                                             
All the Best     
Here he Is                                                                                                                                          spot the Wally!!

[Tommy 73]

You won't regret it John (Sonarworks ref:4) as you can probably see or should i say here the advantages with the headphone version... https://youtu.be/hhGc-YX2-68

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi Tommy

I agree with you as I have just prchased the Headphone Reference 4 to see how I get along.
I had plugged It In  and gave It a quick try and there is a big difference of before and after.
This weekend I will have a go at mixing my song with Sonarworks and the first thing for me Is sorting the bass end out.
I also purchased some AKG open back 702's and they are In the Sonarworks list.
later I may go for the Speaker monitor package with a microphone. I think you can upgrade and buy the mic separately.
With the Genos I find the bass is the one to get right and the rest is not so bad.
I rang Focusrite because I was getting no sound recording and that really baffled me as It worked before. Sods law or something there.
They remotely went Into my computer and came up with a solution almost like yours. I thank you for all of your help as It is now sinking in. I was frightened of change i suppose.
I tried your way and I nearly blew my head off with sound. Do not worry my Focusrites are still ok.
Not your fault, as i plugged the Focusrite alphas Into  outs 3 and 4 as i thought outs were just outs.
Focusrite tech guy was very helpful and said I should plug Into 1 and 2 which I did  and that was ok.
It maybe that line out 3and 4 was on high setting. I am not technical in electrics!!
Focusrite got my routing all sorted with It's mixer and now I understand.
I just swap the main outs over on the Genos and plug the DXR8's in when playing and practicing. The hum destroyer is for the DXR8's only.
This way I do not have to keep switching on the Focusrite and setting the Ins and outs and opening up Cubase just to play and practice. Just switch back the main outs of the Genos to record In Cubase. Only takes a second to do this.

This all now works great without any glitches as i have  a fast computer
I have wrote every thing down so I do not get mixed up again.
Big thanks again for helping me.


all the best
John

[Tommy 73]

No problem John.. looks like reading through some of your threads you are getting lots of useful help and I am finding it interesting to read some of the recommendation and advice ... keep us posteded as things progress as I'm looking forward to hearing some of the end results... I'm still lurking around here on the Genos forum although I still have not purchased one.. I did a few weeks ago drive up to e-pianos in Banbury from Dorset and spent the afternoon with Genos but still not sure just yet...so following things around here as I ponder