Hello,

I hardly ever do this - but I'm reading my S900's manual from cover to cover... I printed an extra copy, and am highlighting "interesting" things that I see/learn as I go. It's been surprisingly worthwhile so far - I'm learning alot of neat tricks and tips. I take the book to the keyboard to try out new things after reading a chapter or so.

Anyway, I was reading this about the "OPEN & SELECT" option. It's supposed to be so that when you select a Voice by pressing a Voice button (such as Piano or Strings), if you set the UTILITY CONFIG 2 page setting right, it will:

"Opens the Voice selector with the top (first) voice of the voice category automatically selected". Instead, it seems that the S900 opens the Voice selector page, and auto-selects whatever voice that was last used under that button, even if it's on Page 2 or 3 etc.

Is this a "known feature" (i.e. bug) or is the manual just wrong?!

I'd like it if it opened the top-left so I can predict (know) what's gonna happen if I quickly press a Voice button. The way it seems to actually work, I will get whatever sound was last used in that category, even if it was a couple of songs ago and I don't remember. Not a big deal, but was wondering about this.

Thanks for any comments . . .

Jim

I'm not sure I understand your question...
If you select "Open Only", you can select a page and until you select a voice it won't change no matter what catagory you are in.
If you select "Open and Select", you will have a sound change in each catagory you go to. It remember the last sound used in each catagory.
So, for most people, "open only" is a wiser choice so you can find the sound you want and it waits for you to select it.


------------------
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California
818-881-5566
www.kayesmusicscene.com

I think one of the big problems (but we should be so lucky!) with modern arrangers is the huge range of choice they give us Thousands of Tones, hundreds of styles, hundreds of OTSs...

Some deal better with all this than others, but especially in Tone and Style selection, I think all manufacturers should provide a USER area to organize these things, for each category. As an option, selecting a Tone Bank should open the USER page for that bank FIRST. You gather your most used sounds of that category in there, and nine times out of ten, all your favorites will fit on the one page.

Same thing with Styles, OTS (if the work this way on your arranger), Multipads, etc.. A simple option in the Utility Page to open the USER choices first...

Some can do this, but most can't (not without a pile of work, anyway). What do you think?

"What do you think?"

I think you finally had a good idea!
Bear in mind, my definition of a good idea is one I think I might like.
Actually the old PSR8000 had this capability. You could arrange the factory styles inside the banks any way you wanted. Like the Roland chord sequencer thing, it was lost along the way somewhere.
Current Yamahas do have a bank for User voices of course, but not like you are suggesting. Good idea.
DonM

you can do it with korgs too

To the person who wrote that they did not understand my question ...

It was simply that the manual says, for OPEN & SELECT mode:
"Opens the Voice selector with the top (first) voice of the voice category automatically selected"

when in fact in this mode it opens the Voice selector with whichever voice you'd last used automatically selected.

I guess it's just that the manual doesn't really tell the full real story as to what happens in OPEN & SELECT mode. . .

Jim

The Ty2 manual reads similarly Jim, but like you say Ty2 selects and loads the last used voice when the buttons are pressed.

If you've been working with say the piano voices and then decide to work on strings (none of which have up to now been selected) the first string voice IS in fact then selected - and loaded.

John

That's why I like number pads on keyboards. I find Yamaha's way of selecting sounds on the 900 to be quite cumbersome. hit the category you want, then hit what page you want, which is on an entirely differnt part of the board, and then select which sound on that page you want, again, in a different place on the board. with a nice number pad you can just enter the number of the sound you want and you're done. 3 reasons I'll never give up my Roland XP-80. Navigation, navigation, navigation.

The problem with this (I think we talked about this a while ago) is that, with several THOUSANDS of sounds to chose from, all with a unique PC/32/00 address, it's a major chore just remembering what the codes for your favorite few are, yet alone that mandolin you use maybe twice a year...

It's not like it used to be, back in the day, when a keyboard was lucky to have just a few hundred Tones, and the codes to address them didn't, by necessity, have to have so many different Bank commands.

A User Favorites section is getting to be almost a necessity. I know Korg's system, from my Triton. It is very cool, you can gather either single Patches or Combi's on the same page, but you have to call up the Favorites differently than access to the main Tones.

I think that simple option to call the User pages up FIRST when you hit a Tone Category button would be a very effective way of dealing with this. With 16 different categories, and a dozen or more Tones displayed when you first open it up, that's still 192 separate numbers to memorize to have the same degree of access using a numeric system. Perhaps you are better than me, but personally, that's too much to remember for me...

Perhaps an improvement might be 'first touch opens User Tones, second touch opens up Factory banks'...

In fact, that, as default behavior, might be all you need.

Of course, Roland don't have any User Tones at all, but who knows. Maybe someone from Roland with a brain is reading this...

(sound of crickets chirping in a field)