I don’t believe the TC units can look at audio and MIDI simultaneously, and to be honest, the audio in chord recognition is designed primarily for either a guitar or a piano, relatively simple waveforms with no unpitched information. Feeding it a complete mix with drums and percussion not to mention passing notes and chords the style may have isn’t all that good at generating nice clean tracking.

It might be interesting to disconnect the audio cord and see if things still work well without it (if you’ve set up the correct MIDI channels from your chording hand). Or pull the MIDI/USB and see if just tracking audio gives you a lot of glitches.

Either I’m reading this wrong, or it seems you’ve sacrificed one whole side of your stereo mix to control the harmonizer. Even if you’re running mono, the effects and stereo panning of internal drum kits means you need to get both sides to the mixer.

This would kind of wild if what you're saying works, lol...

27+ years doing this and still can't hook stuff up right... ffs...


I'll test this out prior to tomorrow's gig and report back...

Thanks, Diki!

I just tried it with just the midi cable and the harmonies were off and no keys came through the PA.

THEN I connected the psr to a vacant channel on the mixer and it sounded weak and harmonies tracked oddly.

Then Hooked it up as I usually do and it sounded great, with harmonies spot on.

I don't claim to understand AT ALL why this way sounds good and the other ways didn't...

I would probably guess that perhaps you don’t have your NTA (notes to arranger) channel from the keyboard set to control the harmonizer correctly. In theory at least, the harmonizer wants to hear simply the notes that determine the chord you are playing, which is why they work so well with a guitar input.

You might want to take a closer look at how you have the TC set to receive MIDI, it should be decent tracking without audio ins…

If you are losing one side of your stereo mix to controlling the TC, perhaps your mixer has a spare ‘send’ or monitor output that you can use to send to the TC so you aren’t losing half your mix. AFAIK, there’s no way to have both outputs of a stereo output send the exact same thing. Yes, you might have all the instruments and kits panned centrally, but there are a lot of sounds and ALL the kits with distinct left and right side sounds (say a drumkit’s Tom toms going left to right) and the effects like reverb’s phasers and especially panners need both sides to sound the way they’re intended. Even if you run mono, you need both sides…

If you can’t get the harmonizer to work with MIDI alone, try using a mixer send…

You must set the keyboard's midi input to Keyboard and Style in order for the midi information to be read.

Press Function, Select MIDI then you can make the selection of Keyboard and Style. This will remain permanent and be default when you fire up the keyboard.

Hope this helps,

Gary

Gary, I km not that familiar with the Yamaha Way, but on Roland’s there was a dedicated NTA channel that output the chord information only (derived from what you are playing). It’s basically the output of the chord recognition once it figures out the chord (rather than what you actually played, for instance if you are using chord shortcuts or one finger stuff).

Is it possible to send that to the harmonizer? That’s what’s basically happening with internal harmonizers, I believe.

The method I posted sends the midi information to the harmonizer via the midi output connection of the keyboard, which I feed directly into my TC Helicon Harmony-M. I then output the Harmony-M back through the keyboard's Line In, which eliminates the use of mixer for the mic. I can set the effects on the Harmony-M, and the type of harmony, then combine it with any additional effects I wish to select from the keyboard, thereby providing a tremendous amount of variables to select from, which is all saved in a set-up registration. Everything is then outputted from the keyboard's audio outputs to the PA system(s)

Gary

Gary, if you just take the arranger’s MIDI out to the harmonizer, what Part or Channel do you select to output, or do you send it all and the harmonizer filters which one is used to derive the chord?

Just curious…

If the TCH has been putting out proper harmonies hooked up as is, would that mean the settings in the PSR-S970 are already set set properly?

Diki, there are several options for the midi output. These are: All parts, KBD & Style, Master KBD, Song, Clock Ext., Midi Accord 1, Midi Accord 2, Midi Pedal 1, Midi Pedal 2, Off. Through trial and error, KBD and Style worked best for me with the Harmony-M. Now, each of these settings can be edited, but I did not have to edit the settings, as they worked perfectly without changing the transmit channel, which was Channel-1.

Now, this setting triggers the Harmony-M while playing full fingered, or full chords in the Multi-finger mode. It does not recognize single finger chords like the onboard harmonizer does. I suspect some editing would allow the single fingered mode to trigger it as well, but I don't know how to do this. This does recognize all other, full fingered chords with no hiccups or delays.

Bill, you can check to see where your keyboard is set by pressing: Function, MIDI, and the display will show you the highlighted area where your keyboard is outputting the information via the MIDI output. Additionally, when I first got the TC Helicon Harmony-M, I had t set the MIDI receive channel on the TC and save the information to default. It was pretty easy to do, if I recall.

Gary