From: awkerr@zia.aoc.nrao.edu (Alan Kerr)
Subject: Re: What's your opinion of Yamaha TG100
Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro NM
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 92 01:45:42 GMT

In article <1426@chorus.chorus.fr> mir@chorus.chorus.fr (Adam Mirowski) writes:
>awkerr@zia.aoc.nrao.edu (Alan Kerr) writes:
>: In article <1415@chorus.chorus.fr> mir@chorus.chorus.fr (Adam MIROWSKI) writes:
>I don't have the impression the SC is able
>to detune voice components beyond what is
>preset. I don't remember having seen a sysex
>message that acts on only one partial of a
>voice.
>
>BTW, how do you access voices above 128?
>I would like to support this method is a
>generalized music file processing tool I am
>working on.

good question.... time to look at the manual.  ...and it's a pretty
good one.  *everything* is in the MIDI Data Format appendix.
hmmmm.... this looks *useful*.  the answer is sysex.  you can tell it
to switch banks.  this is also how you can change between the 10
different drum kits.  actually, it looks like *everything* can be
altered by sysex and the appendix gives you values for everything.
I need to play with this and see how good/bad things sound if I start
changing things *during* playback.  for example, you can change the EG
attack and the EG release rates and the reverb levels and amounts.
>
>GS =  a set of sysexes (for doing anything) and also
>a set of Non Registered Parameter Numbers (for setting
>envelope and filter parameters), plus a set of normal
>controllers, but I ignore which are for GS specifically.

hmmm... maybe it *can* do this.  could you give me an example of one
or two of these (and the sysex hex code) so that I can see if the
TG100 will do that.  All you might have to do is change the 'roland'
byte to be a 'yamaha' byte in the sysex.

>: as above, one disadvantage is that the General MIDI voices can't be
>: edited.  You have to copy the voice to slots 129-196 and edit them
>: there.  The polyphony *seems* better but some of the voices use two
>: elements which will cut down on 'effective' polyphony, but this seems
>: to be less of a problem (ie the SC does this more often).

On further research, I'm not *sure* if the polyphony goes down.  The
manual never comes out and says it.  A two-element voice might just be
looking up two different addresses in 'wave memory' for it's
information but not actually reduce the polyphony..... more things to
find out.

>: The voices sound a *little* poorer than a SC.
>
>Which doesn't already sound very rich...

actually, with all the sysex, I wonder if the TG100 can't be tweeked
into sounding better.  The 'poorer' sound was more in range that is
sounds good in rather than the actual sound.  and as far as 'richness'
goes, maybe you can detune and change the voices to be more rich (or
to your liking).  I noticed that *all* the synth voices (81-104) are
two-element voices.  and since each element can change its: level,
detune, pitch-rate scaling, note shift (+-24 semitones) and in
addition the LFO can be changed, you *could* do some *very* low level
synthesis with the voices.

hmmm... I wonder if this is like the Mac vs IBM debate.  The SC is
like a Mac that will do everything 'well' out of the box (just
double-click) while the TG100 is like an IBM where you have to write a
small file to change the defaults to what *you* would like.

Alan

-- 
Alan W. Kerr                               awkerr@aoc.nrao.edu
National Radio Astronomy Observatory       awkerr@nrao.bitnet
Socorro, NM, USA                           uunet!nrao.edu!awkerr
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers.synth