I have recently purchased a Yamaha PSR540, which is an XG compatable keyboard. The XG tones are weak variations of the panel voices plus a few other weak voices. Why all the hype? Can these be changed to useable voices? To do this do you need a computer hookup and XGWorks?

Your keyboard offers two banks of voices, "Panel" voices and "XG" voices. To ensure compatibility between all other psr keyboards bearing the XG symbol, there is a set of predefined voices based on the original GM set of voices. This set is the same "sounds" across all xg instruments and ensures compatibility when playing songs between them. The XG voices do not necessarily get the best out of the keyboard, since they are designed for maximum polyphony and must not use any special features of the keyboard which may not be available on other xg instruments.
The panel voices take these sounds and build on them to gain the best out of a specific instrument, in your case the psr540. The panel voices use exactly the same technology used to create those xg sounds, but this time voices are layered together (to get thicker sounds), and there are digital effects applied. The waveforms used in panel voices are also higher quality, according to the model keyboard - panel voices then are specifically designed for each psr model, to get the best out of that keyboard, whilst the xg set of voices are more a common set of unified sounds that will work across all xg compatible instruments.
Yes I agree the xg voices do sound weak when played on their own, but once you apply digital effects and start to play around with the voice parameters (try XGedit from yamaha's website) you can achieve quite a bit from them.

Hope that helps to explain things!

Regards
Simon


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Simon G.K. Williams
simon@svpworld.com
Creative Music & Multimedia
http://www.svpworld.com
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Simon is spot on. The XG stuff is there to allow more accurate playback of GM files and is therefore designed to work well together as an ensemble rather than for any voice to stand out and make you go "wow".

I bought a PSR630 (rather than lower order PSrs at the time) precisely because it possessed the XG voices and a floppy disc drive!