You may or not know I play as an accompanist for singing lessons, where I have the privelege of playing a PSR9000. However, there's one problem that I keep having that's starting to annoy me.

I can never layer sounds anymore, because I always have the problem of the sound 'cutting out', even when I'm not playing that many notes! Considering the polyphony is double to my PSR2000 and I don't have any problems with that, this is quite surprising. Does anyone have any suggestions for what is wrong?

Thanks,

Jamie Frost

Poor allocation of polyphony has always been my biggest gripe with the psr9000, 9000pro and also the X1 and SD1. They do not handle the allocation of important notes well at all. Assuming that you are using the best sounds, you can run out of notes very fast IF you use the sustain pedal.

The "best" piano and the "best" string sound are both big offenders in the polyphonic hog deal. If the piano sound is an 4 partial sound, and the string sound is too - then you've got 8 notes for each finger that is pressed. try a 6 note chord ... that's ummmm........(6 times 8 ...) - 48 right there. Press the sustain pedal just once, and you've asked a 64 voice instrument to produce 96 tones at once.

** Bleep-bleep ** bleep-bleep **
"DANGER, DANGER - WIll Robinson !!!!"
(ain't gonna do it !)

Somehow, the 32 voices in the older Roland and Korg units were better at this task than these new ones are. They SHOULD be last note priority, but it coughs, and hic-cups so badly that it's hard to tell just WHAT drops out first.

The bad news gets worse too:
Even the 9kpro (which is 126 notes) has the same trouble when you layer the best sounds. It seems that even though they doubled the capacity - they might have doubled the number of partials in the really good sounds too.

Frustrating isn't it?

Try using the XG voices as your layers. They are not as good as the panel voices, and might not steal as much polyphony.

I was told the Yamaha CVP 209 top of the range clavinova at £5000 or $8000 had note drop out when played normally. I did not believe it until I heard it for myself...

The spec of this machine is 256 note polyphony!

Same problem with the Motif. Only 62 "events" of polyphony. I understand the way it's supposed to work but it drives me nuts that a board can sound so good and yet have these issues. Adding one of the plug in boards will add polyphony, but only to the plug in voices. I was considering what I might be losing by going from the Motif to the 9000 pro ( soundwise / featurewise ), but if it also has polyphony issues, there would be no point. I can play along with the same midi sequences on the PA80 and the Motif and never have any dropout on the PA80, yet I have dropouts on the Motif BEFORE I ever sustain any notes. That and I don't like that on the Motif I have to go into the sequencer mode to play along with a sequence. I like it a lot better the way it's setup on the 9000, 2000, PA80. I can't access the preset or user voices in the normal way on the Motif when playing from the sequencer mode. I can use them, but I have to set them up by assigning a voice to a blank midi track and then setting all the parameters up from scratch.

AJ

[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 04-28-2002).]