layering voices

[alecras234]

Hi im having trouble with layering voices using the Dual voice button on my yamaha E453 keyboard. I'm looking at what it tells me in the instruction book, it says press and hold the dual button longer than a second and the word dual is highlighted on the lcd, turn wheel to select a dual voice. I press the dual button for more than a second but the word dual doesn't come up on the lcd. The option to select a voice does but as soon as i press dual, the keyboard goes to style rather than voice. HELP

 

[Sven Golly]

[video:youtube]

[SeaGtGruff]

The DUAL button has two purposes-- (1) to toggle the Dual Voice on or off, and (2) to quickly go to the function that lets you select which voice you want to use as the Dual Voice.

 

To toggle the Dual Voice on or off, quickly press and release the DUAL button. The word "DUAL" will appear or disappear in the upper left corner of the LCD screen to indicate whether the Dual Voice is toggled on or off.

 

Note that several preset voices turn the Dual Voice on when you select them as the Main Voice, because they are a layered preset which combines two different (single) voices, or in some cases two instances of the same voice with different settings. For example, voice 002 (Octave Piano) uses voice 001 (Grand Piano) for both the Main Voice and Dual Voice, but the Dual Voice is set to a different octave than the Main Voice.

 

Of course, when you select voice 002 as the Main Voice it will say voice 002 on the screen, not voice 001, but if you monitor the MIDI messages being sent by the keyboard you can see that it's using voice 001 for the Main Voice. In genereal, you can also tell from looking at the Voice List which voice will be used as the Main Voice in a layered preset, because the layered presets will say "-|-|-" in the Bank Select and Program Change columns and will usually be listed immediately after whichever non-layered voice is used for the Main Voice. For example, voices 074, 075, and 076 all have "-|-|-" in the Bank/Program columns since they're layered presets, whereas voice 073 has numbers in those columns since it's a single or non-layered voice, which generally indicates that voices 074, 075, and 076 combine voice 073 (as the Main Voice) with another non-layered voice (as the Dual Voice). (Unfortunately, in the Voice Lists of certain older models the layered voices were sometimes listed together as a group, after all of the non-layered voices, which made it impossible to tell which voice was being used as the Main Voice unless you monitored the outgoing MIDI messages; but for the newer models the layered voices are usually dispersed throughout the Voice List such that they immediately follow the voice that's used as the Main Voice.)

 

Now, you might wonder why I just went off on a tangent to give all that detail, but I'll come back to it in a moment!

 

To select which voice you want to use as the Dual Voice, you can either press the FUNCTION button to enter the function menu and then use the CATEGORY up/down buttons to laboriously navigate to the "D.Voice" function, or just press and hold the DUAL button to both enter the function menu and go directly to the "D.Voice" function in one fell swoop. Either way, you'll notice that the STYLE button usually lights up. There's a reason for this, which I'll come back to in a moment. After you've selected the voice that you want to use for the Dual Voice, and have set any other functions that you want to change, you can exit the function menu by pressing either the FUNCTION button or the VOICE button.

 

Remember my lengthy tangent about the layered presets? It turns out that when you select a non-layered preset as the Main Voice the keyboard will automatically select some other predetermined non-layered voice as the Dual Voice, even though the Dual Voice isn't turned on for that particular preset. For this reason you should always select the Main Voice first before you select the Dual Voice, because if you select the Dual Voice first and then try to select the Main Voice it will most likely wipe out your Dual Voice selection (unless you'd just happened to select the same voice as the predetermined one).

 

Now let's talk about that pesky STYLE button that usually lights up whenever you go into the function menu. The keyboard has four buttons that light up to indicate which mode it's in-- PATTERN, SONG, STYLE, and VOICE. The VOICE button is the one you press when you want to select which Main Voice to use, and VOICE isn't a mode per se like the other three are, because the Main Voice (as well as the Dual Voice and Split Voice if you've turned them on) will always be active, even if you press the PATTERN, SONG, or STYLE button. In contrast, PATTERN, SONG, and STYLE are three separate modes that can't be used with each other-- i.e., you can play a pattern, or play a song, or play a style, but you can't play a pattern and a song at the same time, or a pattern and a style, or a song and a style. (On the other hand, you can record a song in which you're playing a pattern or style, then play back the song and it will replay the pattern or style that you recorded; but that's not the same thing as being able to use the PATTERN or STYLE mode at the same time as the SONG mode.)

 

There are certain functions and other settings associated with the PATTERN, SONG, and STYLE modes-- e.g., the Style Volume, Song Volume, and Pattern Volume; the Style Number, Song Number, and Pattern Number; the Accompaniment on/off toggle flag; the Split Point; the Style Variation; the Tempo; and the various Track on/off toggle flags. Although these are separate settings, some of them are actually stored in the same bytes as each other when you save them to a registration-- e.g., the Style Volume and Pattern Volume are stored in the same byte as each other in a registration. You can save either the style-related settings or the pattern-related settings to a given registration, but you can't save both types of settings to the same registration.

 

The reason the STYLE button usually lights up whenever you enter the function menu is to show you which types of settings you can change-- e.g., if the STYLE button is lit up then you can change the Style Volume but not the Pattern Volume or Song Volume; or if the SONG button is lit up then you can change the Song Volume but not the Style Volume or Pattern Volume; etc. However, note that if you press any of these four buttons-- PATTERN, SONG, STYLE, or VOICE-- while you're already in the function menu, it will kick you out of the function menu, since pressing any of those buttons will take you to the screen where you select the pattern number, song number, style number, or voice number you want to use. Also, remember that VOICE isn't a separate mode like the other three-- i.e., the keyboard will always be in one of its other three modes (PATTERN, SONG, or STYLE) even if the VOICE button is lit up. In any case, if the VOICE button is lit up when you press the FUNCTION button, the VOICE button will go out and one of the other three buttons will light up depending on which mode the keyboard is currently in. Don't worry, you're still in the function menu and can change the Main Voice, Dual Voice, or Split Voice settings even though the VOICE button is no longer lit up.

 

Now let's talk a little more about registrations. Many Yamaha keyboards-- in particular, the PSR-S, Tyros, and Genos models-- let you "freeze" parameters so you can recall registrations without affecting the current settings of those parameters. The PSR-E models don't have this "freeze" feature, but fortunately there's still a way to recall a registration without affecting the currently-selected style or pattern. What you do is press the SONG button just before you save a particular registration, which causes the keyboard to save a special high value in the various style- and pattern-related settings. Then you'll be able to recall that particular registration without causing those settings to change unexpectedly during your performance.