A question for the more experienced MODX users.

[RABid]

Just got my MODX6+ and am trying to set it up to use in the church choir. We already have piano, organ, and someone playing string parts on a Nord Stage 2. Plus we have a selection of other instruments ranging from guitar to trumpets. I will be covering horn parts along with some bells, chimes, etc... Either the manual is very inadequate when it comes to setting up favorites, or I am missing something. It is a really short manual when you consider how many languages it covers. I did not find anything in the manual. Watched a YouTube video which went right over my head.

 

Anyway, I see two ways to accomplish whaat I want, which is to be able to quickly switch between a few select sounds. I most likely will not be doing any layering. So, set up a list of favorite patches... French Horns, Synth Brass, bright trumpets, etc... Or set up a scene where I turn parts on and off.

 

Which do you suggest? I'm guessing I will have maybe 8 patches to swap between. By the way, while in category search and inside brass I found some patches I wanted to add to favorites. There is a "Favorite" button at the bottom of the screen but when I tap it, it only blinks a red dot and does not save to favorites. Am I missing something?

[Old No7]

Sorry that this isn't a direct answer to your question, but see if these two supplemental Yamaha resources are of any help for you:

 

* MODX Essential Knowledge Guide

 

* MODX6 Supplemental Manual

 

I'll try to attach them as PDF files below, as they might help on many other topics too!

 

(I'd found these online, from Yamaha's "MODX download or resource" site I believe.)

 

Old No7

 

 

MODX Essential Knowledge Guide.pdf MODX6 Supplemental Manual.pdf

[Jose EB5AGV]

I have just tried the Favorite selection on my MODX6+ and it works as follows:

 

Select the Category and the Performance you like:

 

 

Press Set:

 

 

And that is all:

 

 

So when you press Set, it adds an small asterisk on the selected Performance 

 

What am I missing? 🤔

[Jose EB5AGV]

36 minutes ago, RABid said:

Just got my MODX6+ and am trying to set it up to use in the church choir. We already have piano, organ, and someone playing string parts on a Nord Stage 2. Plus we have a selection of other instruments ranging from guitar to trumpets. I will be covering horn parts along with some bells, chimes, etc... Either the manual is very inadequate when it comes to setting up favorites, or I am missing something. It is a really short manual when you consider how many languages it covers. I did not find anything in the manual. Watched a YouTube video which went right over my head.

 

Anyway, I see two ways to accomplish whaat I want, which is to be able to quickly switch between a few select sounds. I most likely will not be doing any layering. So, set up a list of favorite patches... French Horns, Synth Brass, bright trumpets, etc... Or set up a scene where I turn parts on and off.

 

Which do you suggest? I'm guessing I will have maybe 8 patches to swap between. By the way, while in category search and inside brass I found some patches I wanted to add to favorites. There is a "Favorite" button at the bottom of the screen but when I tap it, it only blinks a red dot and does not save to favorites. Am I missing something?

 

Regarding the way to select sounds, I would use Performances and organize them as Live Sets

 

You can name the Performances with generic names, as French Horns, or arrange them with song names, depending on your necessities. I find this way more flexible than just use Favorites

[kalpajazz]

Select a performance you want to use, then press "shift+live set." This sends the performance to the first available slot of the live set mode. You have 16 slots per screen.

 

[Stokely]

Live Sets are what I used at gigs.

Additionally, if you get in a situation where you have a really fast switch to a different set of sounds, you might be able to use Scenes (there are 4 scene buttons over under the part sliders).  They are intended I think to use within a song, as they are essentially mixer settings for the Parts, but no reason you couldn't use them to allow one Performance to handle multiple songs if you had such a quick change and didn't want to select the Live Set.  

Example where I used Scenes:   Comfortably Numb, on Scene 1 the verse Parts (winds and a bit of horn) were up, strings were pretty much down.  Scene 2 was for the chorus, and I dipped down those verse sounds and brought the strings up.   The one potential downside of Scenes are that they are abrupt; this could be a good thing depending on the song of course.

For more gradual changes, the (throbbing!) Super Knob is very handy.  Or footy, if you hook up an expression pedal (it will default to controlling the Super Knob).  The SK is a really cool macro control that can manage other controls, meaning it can do multiple things and in multiple directions.  Have it bring up a Part while turning down another one, or have it control some aspect of the parts like reverb amount etc.

In short, sounds like Live Sets are what you need.  You can have multiple pages of them, I had 6 or 7 pages for gigs though not all were used at any one gig.  Unfortunately there is no Nord Sound Manager equivalent for shuffling them around, unless maybe the 3rd party Melas tools (which are not free) can do that.

[EscapeRocks]

As others have said, Set List mode is your friend.

 

It's also very easy to edit the set list screen to order them the way you desire.

 

Scenes are also very good for those quick changes within a song. For example you can use the Scene within a performance to turn on or off parts as necessary

 

If you are wanting smooth transitions from one sound into the next within a song, don't forget about the Superknob (which can be controlled by a pedal in FC2).   You can morph from one part to another very smoothly.  I make ample use of that in my setups.

 

I have never used the Favorites so I am no help there.

 

Here's a look at one of my gig setups

 

My MODX is used as a master.   When I touch the song, it also sends patch change to my Fantom -08

 

[Stokely]

The Favorites are handy for "essential patches" if you tend, like me, to reuse some of them in other performances.   One pain is when you want to add an existing performance to one you are working on, and you then have to navigate to it in order to add it.   The favorites make this quicker.

Maybe practice navigating to and from your own Live Set(s) before getting to the gig   And I swear either those up and down arrows are wrong or my brain is.  I ALWAYS hit the wrong one when going through my Live Sets, and no I never got any better at it.  Something somewhere was simply mis-wired!

Another bit of advice, which you didn't ask for and may not need.  IF you transpose songs--and our band transposes everything a half step down, and I do this globally at the gig by using shift/octave--know that any splits you have created will move.   Meaning, if you set a split point on E and then transpose up or down by 2 half steps, your split point also moves by 2 half steps.  Drives me nuts.   I got in the habit of making the split points while being transposed, which is then only an issue when playing along with the real song in the right key while learning it.   And what I probably should have done from the start is tune the entire instrument down 1/2 step in Utility, and then transpose UP while learning songs!  But I'd already set up a bunch of performances with split points and didn't want to have to go back and mess with them.  

[RABid]

2 hours ago, Old No7 said:

but see if these two supplemental Yamaha resources are of any help for you:

Thanks. Just used air drop to send them to my iPad.

[RABid]

2 minutes ago, Stokely said:

Meaning, if you set a split point on E and then transpose up or down by 2 half steps, your split point also moves by 2 half steps.  Drives me nuts.

Ewwwwww. That is good to know. Thanks.

[Stokely]

Yeah it works differently than others, like the Nord stage 3.

One thing I do like though is that the Modx transpose also changes the midi out notes, so you don't need to worry about anything you might be controlling (I had organs coming from an ipad app).

[RABid]

Thanks everyone. I will work through this and build my favorites, then put them in scenes. It is going to be strange to be moving back and forth between drums and keys. I plan to set the MODX+ up above and behind the floor toms, with the music stand behind the keyboard. I'm guessing that I will get everything set the way I need and be used to the favorites system about the time Christmas season is over.

[pjd]

Late to the Live Set party, but here is a picture of the first page in my church Live Set.

 

Why all the "PJ"? I create and edit almost everything. At the very least, I dial down the reverb. Our church has enough natural reverberation and I don't need to muddy things up. So, in order to track all of my own Performances, I tag the name with "PJ".

 

My church Live Set goes to three pages roughly in the order of necessity and frequency of use. Page one gets a lot of action.

 

Hope this helps -- pj

 

 

[RABid]

11 minutes ago, pjd said:

At the very least, I dial down the reverb.

That was my issue with the original Montage years ago. Everything was drowned in reverb. So far they seem to have dialed it back in the MODX+.

[Stokely]

A tip if you build Performances from other existing performances--what they will do is copy the Parts from those new performances, they don't link to them in place as many keyboards do.  This has plusses and minus IMO.   One thing I find annoying is that many performances have multiple parts so when you combine them with the one you are working on, suddenly you have 6 or 8 Parts when you thought it was only two different sounds    This is extra annoying when doing splits and/or transposing them up or down, because you have to do it for each Part.   Also, effects can be per-part iirc so modifying that becomes more work.

What tend to do is find Performances I like with only one Part, ideally.  Or I'll modify an existing one so that it only has one Part.    Considering each Part can have 8 (iirc) "oscillators" (called Elements), multiple Parts I often find are not needed.   Many of the stock ones are unnecessarily layered, and can sound better when stripped down a bit.

 

[Coker]

In this case, I would organize each patch to cover four sounds and use four scenes to unmute individual sounds.  You could use all 8 scenes, but switching scene banks is an extra step.

[Viv Savage]

1 hour ago, RABid said:

Thanks everyone. I will work through this and build my favorites, then put them in scenes. It is going to be strange to be moving back and forth between drums and keys. I plan to set the MODX+ up above and behind the floor toms, with the music stand behind the keyboard. I'm guessing that I will get everything set the way I need and be used to the favorites system about the time Christmas season is over.

Scenes are great for sound switching, especially when you’d rather use buttons than the touchscreen while playing.  When you set up Scenes, I would recommend doing so using the Keyboard Control function to turn parts on/off per Scene (see the piano icons on the channel strip) rather than muting, which takes up polyphony even for muted parts.  

[Viv Savage]

1 hour ago, RABid said:

Ewwwwww. That is good to know. Thanks.

To be clear, the shifting of split points occurs only with the “Transpose” function, which is unfortunately the function tied to the physical transpose buttons. It’s unclear to me why Yamaha does it this way, other than saying “that’s how we’ve always done it.”   For me it makes the transpose buttons pretty useless. Instead, I pre-set transpositions for each Part in a Performance using the “Note Shift” function in the Edit screen. If you need to transpose on the fly you can go to Utility and use the global “Note Shift” function there.    IMHO it would be more useful for Yamaha to tie the physical transpose buttons to that global Note Shift function, but this is a drop in the bucket of the insane user interface issues with Yamaha boards, and a small entry price to pay for a truly amazing and versatile board that is one of the best bangs for the buck. 

[Viv Savage]

Nobody asked, but if you’re new to MODX, I’ll also say something that  would have saved me some time:

 

If you plan to make use of that fairly generous MODX+ user memory by loading some amazing external sound libraries (of which there are many!), and you find that you want to incorporate library sounds into your custom performances, you should first take the library sound in question and import it to your User area using the Utility / Library Import function, and then add that User sound to your custom Performance.  Otherwise, if your custom Performances point to library locations, any waveforms from those library sounds will not be saved with your User file, which can be a pain later if you need to swap User files for any reason, like loading sounds for a different music project or loading your User file on another MODX/Montage.    The Melas Waveform Editor can also help with this if you end up painting yourself into a corner, but just FYI.  

[RABid]

Thanks. I plan to do this after Christmas so that if I mess something up, it will not matter. In the meantime I will be auditioning libraries.

 

I finally got some favorites set, but not in the way mentioned above or how I saw it done on YouTube. What I have to do is...

 

Click the category button and select the category I want to choose from.

 

Select a sound and try it. If I like that sound my first thought was that I could click on the "Favorite" button at the bottom of the screen and that would make it a favorite. Unfortunately, no. I get that little red blinky telling me I made an illegal choice. The path I discovered is too...

 

Mash the edit button so that the patch shows up on the full screen and ready to edit. The name is in a wide box at the top. At the right of that box is two very faint icons. One is the favorite star. If I press there a new menu box appears on the left. A tall, narrow box. The bottom selection in that box is Favorite.

 

I click on Favorite at the bottom of that box and I get a star telling me it is now a favorites. To go back to choosing more favorites I have to click the category button again which takes me back to selecting a category or choosing a sound in the last selected category.

 

After adding a few sounds to favorites I chose the favorites category and there they were. I'm going to choose my favorites, then try putting them in a performance.

 

 

 

Anyone have any favorite church bell or chime patches? I have not found those yet. Only found one choir patch that I like, but it is a nice one. I'm really avoiding those multi-sound patches because there are three other keyboardist plus a horn section. I don't want to take all the space. That is why I think chimes or church bell sounds may be handy. It has a DX7+ inside. Surely it has a lot of these sounds.

[RABid]

6 hours ago, Jose EB5AGV said:

 

 

 

Just to clarify. When I am on this screen, if I push "Set" under Favorite I only get a little red blinky dot. In fact the only button in this row that works for me is the down arrow. I can use it to scroll down the sounds, but I cannot use the up arrow next to it to scroll up again. Very strange.

[Jose EB5AGV]

1 hour ago, RABid said:

Just to clarify. When I am on this screen, if I push "Set" under Favorite I only get a little red blinky dot. In fact the only button in this row that works for me is the down arrow. I can use it to scroll down the sounds, but I cannot use the up arrow next to it to scroll up again. Very strange.

 

Could you take a picture of that display, to compare with mine?

 

BTW, if you are adding a Part to a Performance, you can't set a Favorite in that moment, only when you are browsing outside of Performance edit 

[RABid]

Ding. Ding. Ding! mystery solved. I went upstairs to take a picture. Was fumbling around trying to hold the camera with one hand and take a picture while pushing the button and show the rid blinky. It worked. Favorite was set. Then I tried it three more times and it would not work. Then it hit me. I remember reading in the MODX thread that someone had to calibrate their screen when they got their new MODX. Tried pushing the button at the extreme bottom of the screen and it worked. I went into the system, found the calibrate routine, and did it. Problem solved. ... This was an open box unit. I wonder if that is why someone returned it. While there was not a mark on the keyboard they sure made a mess of the manual. They had it out for some reason.

[EscapeRocks]

3 hours ago, RABid said:

. Then it hit me. I remember reading in the MODX thread that someone had to calibrate their screen when they got their new MODX. Tried pushing the button at the extreme bottom of the screen and it worked. I went into the system, found the calibrate routine, and did it. Problem solved. ... This was an open box unit. I wonder if that is why someone returned it. While there was not a mark on the keyboard they sure made a mess of the manual. They had it out for some reason.

 

I learned very long time ago with my first touch screen board that the first thing I do is a screen calibration.  Glad you found it

[Jose EB5AGV]

16 hours ago, RABid said:

Ding. Ding. Ding! mystery solved. I went upstairs to take a picture. Was fumbling around trying to hold the camera with one hand and take a picture while pushing the button and show the rid blinky. It worked. Favorite was set. Then I tried it three more times and it would not work. Then it hit me. I remember reading in the MODX thread that someone had to calibrate their screen when they got their new MODX. Tried pushing the button at the extreme bottom of the screen and it worked. I went into the system, found the calibrate routine, and did it. Problem solved. ... This was an open box unit. I wonder if that is why someone returned it. While there was not a mark on the keyboard they sure made a mess of the manual. They had it out for some reason.

 

Those resistive touch panels seem to be susceptible of losing calibration. Also, if you are not accurate when pressing over the calibration points, you get poor results.

 

Now that you have commented it, I recall to have calibrated my two MONTAGEs, bought used, but also my brand new MODX6+. All of them were better after calibration. Perhaps just a coincidence!

 

I still wonder why Yamaha keeps using these panels instead of the newer capacitive ones, which are more accurate, can use multiple touch and don't need calibration. I guess it is cost related, but still...

[zephonic]

1 hour ago, Jose EB5AGV said:

 

Those resistive touch panels seem to be susceptible of losing calibration. Also, if you are not accurate when pressing over the calibration points, you get poor results.

 

Now that you have commented it, I recall to have calibrated my two MONTAGEs, bought used, but also my brand new MODX6+. All of them were better after calibration. Perhaps just a coincidence!

 

I still wonder why Yamaha keeps using these panels instead of the newer capacitive ones, which are more accurate, can use multiple touch and don't need calibration. I guess it is cost related, but still...

 

 

Yes, these resistive touch screens are awful and need to be sent back to 2001 where they belong.

 

Even my $400 aftermarket head unit has a capacitive display.

[Stokely]

Weird I don't think I did any calibration and haven't had any issues using the screen.  I'm not a touch-screen fan in general though, must be said.   They are great for entering patch names and that's about the only think I like about them  

There is a setting to turn off animations (iirc it's called that) which makes the pages switch instantly.  Much better IMO.

 

[ProfD]

9 minutes ago, Stokely said:

Weird I don't think I did any calibration and haven't had any issues using the screen.

Reads Daft Punk...maybe you just got lucky. 😁

 

I believe in most circumstances the touch screen will work properly out of the box.😎

[Jose EB5AGV]

2 hours ago, Stokely said:

Weird I don't think I did any calibration and haven't had any issues using the screen.  I'm not a touch-screen fan in general though, must be said.   They are great for entering patch names and that's about the only think I like about them  

There is a setting to turn off animations (iirc it's called that) which makes the pages switch instantly.  Much better IMO.

 

 

Yes, I did it first day: turn OFF animations and transparency (which is really an ugly thing to begin with!)