Yamah SY85

[mamboking304yahoo.com]

Does anyone know if I can use the SY85 keyboard with the Finale program and be able to hear all of the voices and staves of my score at the same time? I can get my score to play back one staff at a time, in one voice, however, if I play more than one staff, they all play using the same voice patch. I can't seem to get the keyboard to allow me to assign different patches to the differing staves either. If this is not possible with this keyboard, is their any software that would allow me to patch this keyboard into Finale and if not, can you recommend a pretty decent, really cheap general midi keyboard that has some pretty good woodwind and brass sounds?

 

Thanks a lot!

 

Kenneth D. Wood

mamboking304@yahoo.com

[Dave Bryce]

I am not familiar with the SY85, and do not know anything about it's multitimbral capacity (abililty to play multiple channels). The manual is usually a good source of information on that subject.

 

You didn't say anything about the style of music that you want to do, nor what the purpose of your music making is; however, I'll guess from your use of Finale that perhaps you're doing orchestral or some other form of traditional big band arrangement. If that is the case, perhaps a GM module might not be a bad thing, especially if you want to be able to exchange the files with other users or setups.

 

Roland is still the industry standard - they makes all different kinds of GM units for many different applications. Check out their website:

http://www.rolandus.com/home-fst.html

 

or their educational division, Edirol:

http://www.edirol.com

where you can check out GM modules like the SC8820.

 

Hope that helps.

 

dB

[Max Ventura]

Actually, the SY85 was one of the best and most versatile workstations ever built, period.

Although its sequencer had only 8 trax plus one dedicated rhythm track, it was so complete and its editing so precise and quick that I really miss it, even compared with today's modern workstation like the Korg Trinity/Tritons, Roland XP series and Yamaha EX series, all of which can, theoretically, do five-fold the things the SY 85 could do, and have five fold its sounds, but are so complex and slow to interact that is definitely not a pleasure working with them.

Plus, the Yamaha had 8 sliders upfront that, besides controlling filters, envelopes and effects in realtime, doubled as sequencer track mixer. I mean, you could scratch with them, seriously.

Fantastic machine, if you think you can have it now for under $ 400.

Compared with a lot of other stuff from 1992 it has not aged at all. And, compared to SY-77 or 99, it's an athlete.

And it had totall recall with every loading of a song, it could load samples, it had excellent classic and modern sounds (if somewhat limited in the factory set), four-bus multieffects in the voices AND in the sequencer, 4 outs, 16 parts and 30 voices poliphony, and a disk drive.