Yamaha FS1R
Voice Patch Editor
This editor handles voices, not performances. Though FS1R performances and voices are meant to work hand-in-hand, Edisyn's voice and performance editors are separate; but they can work together in certain ways as discussed below.
Communicating with Edisyn
Set the FS1R's to receive System Exclusive, Bulk Dumps, Bank Selection, and Program Change. That is, set Rcv SysExcl, RcvBulkDump, Rcv BankSel, and Rcv PgmChng to ON. Set the Program Change Mode to "Multi". Set the FS1R's Device Number to either ALL or to the Synth ID in Edisyn's MIDI panel. For most MIDI devices, you can probably reduce the FS1R's Dump Interval to 50ms. Set Edisyn's send and receive MIDI channels to the FS1R's receive and send channels respectively.
How Sending, Writing, and Requesting Work
Voices can't be played alone: they have to be placed in a Part in a Performance and played there. To do this, sending, writing, and requesting work in a specific way with regard to the current Part.
- You specify the current part with Send/Receive Part..., a menu option discussed later here.
- Send to Current Patch sets up the voice to be played in the current Performance as the current part.
- Request Current Patch requests the voice currently in the current Part.
- Request Patch... reads the requested voice into the current Part, and then displays it.
- Write to Patch... writes the voice to the patch slot in Internal memory.
About the FS1R Menu
The menu has several options which hopefully make working with the patch editor more useful:
- Set Up Test Performance for Part 1 with Filter This builds a blank Performance with empty effects, and sends it to the FS1R, then sets Send/Receive Part... to 1, and then Auditions the Part with the filter switch turned on (see menu options below). As a result, the Performance is set up to receive notes only on Part 1, the voice gets sent to Part 1, Part 1's filter is turned on, and the other Parts are turned off. You may find this useful for initiating and editing a brand new voice patch.
- Set Up Test Performance for Part 1 without Filter Exactly the same as above, except that Part 1's filter switch is turned off.
- Audition Part with Filter This sets the current part's MIDI channel to the the Performance's channel, and it turns off all the other parts' MIDI channels. That way when you play notes, you will hear exactly and only the voice you're working on. Additionally, the current part's filter switch is turned on. You may find this useful for editing an existing voice patch in the context of its Performance. If you switch to another part, you'll have to Audition it again. To undo all this, you can fire up a Performance patch editor and manually change the various Part MIDI settings. Or you can request the voice's Performance patch (by patch number, not "current patch") from the synth again.
- Audition Part without Filter Exactly the same as above, except that the current part's filter switch is turned off.
- Strip Effects This turns off all effects in the Performance. You might wish to do this if you had loaded a performance and wanted to hear how a given voice actually sounded.
- Mute Operators...nbsp; This lets you temporarily mute voiced and unvoiced operators of your choice, notionally so you can focus on hearing certain operators. "Muting" mean that Edisyn will send the FS1R a command to set their Output Level to 0, and another command to disable Fseq. The actual parameter setting in Edisyn will be unaffected. If an operator is unmuted, Output Level and Fseq will be restored. Note that this only applies to immediate real-time changes: requesting a patch, writing a patch, or sending it, may reset the Mute settings.
- Send/Receive Part (1, 2, 3, 4) This causes Edisyn to use the given Part when sending and requesting the current voice patch. This allows you to work on different Parts of a performance. You may also wish to Audition on the part (see menu item above) after setting this.
- Swap Operators... This lets you swap two operators, including voiced and/or unvoiced parameters.
- Copy Operator To... This lets you copy an operator to another (or to all of them), including voiced and/or unvoiced parameters. You can of course copy an operator to another using Edisyn's copy tab menu options, but you can't filter for voiced or unvoiced parameters.
- Copy Voiced->Unvoiced This copies relevant voiced parameters to the equivalent unvoiced parameters in an operator.
- Copy Unvoiced->Voiced This copies relevant unvoiced parameters to the equivalent voiced parameters in an operator.
- Copy 1 Copy 1, 2 Copy 1, 2, 3, 4 These methods bulk copy certain operators to other operators. The purpose of these methods is to facilitate building voices with formants. Typically you'd arrange operators into identical groups of 8, 4, or 2, and then have the output of each group pass through a different bandpass filter to form a formant filter bank. There are only certain algorithms appropriate for this, and these methods copy the operators within those algorithms to form identical groups.
- Copy 1 Copies operator 1 to operators 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. This is appropriate for Algorithm 1.
- Copy 1, 2 Copies operator 1 to operators 3, 5, and 7; and copies operators 2 to operators 4, 6, and 8. This is appropriate for Algorithm 67.
- Copy 1, 2, 3, 4 Copies operator 1 to operator 5; operator 2 to 6; operator 3 to 7; and operator 4 to 8. This is appropriate for Algorithms 69, 70, 71, 72, and 77.
Note that these three menu options copy and overwrite all the operator parameters, including those involving the (different) bandpass filters. This means that you need to set up the filter for each group, or set its output level to 0, after applying this copying operation.
Loading DX7 Patches
It's easy: just use the DX7 Editor.
Gotchas
- Changing patches or loading a patch takes a very long amount of time, during which the FS1R will be unresponsive to requests to play notes etc. You will find this annoying.
- Because loading a patch takes a long time (just under 3 seconds) batch-downloading patches from the unit can take much longer than you'd expect.
- If you set the bandwidth of an unvoiced operator to 0, unexpected and unstable sound occurs. Don't do that: it's not clear why it's even an option. See pages 80 and 81 of the manual.
- If a Part is set to mono (not poly), and you change the voice's Algorithm while playing a note, the FS1R will hang and stop making sound. You can bring the synth back to life by requesting the current patch again, or sending All Sounds Off.
Thanks to K_Take (k_take@dual.squares.net) for giving me access to the source code of FS1REditor and permission to reuse many of its embedded tables, without which Edisyn's patch editor would not have been possible. And thanks to Thor Zollinger (thor276@cableone.net) for his tutoring on the internal operation of the FS1R. Thanks to Jeremy Bernstein (jeremy@cycling74.com) for his help in debug
ging.
By
| Sean Luke
|
Date
| July 2020
|