One of the cooler things in the Motif ES Mix Mode is the addition of direct voice editing without having to go to the voice mode. This is great because it allows me to make a significant voice edit above and beyond the offsets that are already available in the mix mode, save my sound to a specific "Mix Voice" bank that is associated to the song or pattern I am working on and then save the whole song or pattern file to a USB device or SmartMedia card.
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The benefit is that I can completely edit a voice with the same flexibility and power that I have in voice mode and save it to a bank that is specific to my song or pattern without overwriting to one of the user banks. That is a great feature: I basically never have to leave the creative space of the sequencer and mixer, and I won't have to worry about overwriting a voice in either of the internal banks when I am working on a song.
In the following article, please follow along with what I am doing on your Motif ES. It may open up a whole new level in the instrument for you. In this pattern I am working on, I want to add a new, more appropriate jazz guitar voice to the groove. In this instance I have chosen a voice that is close to what I want called "GT: Jazzy Pick", located in Preset Bank 2, voice number 37. This is a very nice, clean flat-picked jazz guitar sound, but I really want to add some hair to the sound by changing the programmed insert effects.
Fig.1 
The first thing I want to do is make sure that the voice has its insert effects on. In a new pattern or song location, parts 1-8 all default with their insert effects on. I can access what is seen below in screen shot by pressing, in the following order, PATTERN/MIX/[F3] EFFECT/[SF2] INS SW. The screen before me looks like this:
Fig.2 
In the screen shot above I can see that the insert effect switch is on for the first 8 parts. Since my jazz guitar sound is on part 1, I will have access to the 2 insert effects associated with that sound . Now I am ready to do some direct voice editing from the Mix Mode.
Now I'll press [MIX] to return to the main Mix Mode screen. From this main screen I can enter Mix Voice Edit function by pressing [F5] VCE ED:
This is the Mix Voice Common Edit mode. The screen I am looking at now looks like this:
Fig.3 
Here I can edit common parameters, or parameters that affect the overall voice (in a moment I'll look at individual elements within a voice). The first thing I want to do is edit one of the insert effects and add a tube amp distortion to the clean jazz guitar sound. From the screen above, I'll press [F6] EFFECT. I am now looking at this screen:
Fig. 4 
From this screen I can easily cursor over and change the effect. For this sound I want to change Insert Effect B from the programmed effect of AmpSim 2 (an amplifier simulation effect) to V-Distortion (a more complex physical model of a guitar pre-amp, speaker and delay effect). Below is the screen shot of the original sound with compared with the edited sound:
Fig. 5a(Original) 
Fig. 5b (Edited) 
Playing the Jazzy Pick guitar sound before and after really underscores how drastically the entire character of a sound can change just by changing the effect type . To get the sound I am looking for, I will need to edit the Insert B effect. To edit the V-Distortion effect, I press [SF3] INS B. Below are the default settings for the V-Distortion effect (2 pages-change page using the L-R data entry buttons):
Fig. 6a 
Fig. 6b 
2 Remember: Pressing the [EDIT/COMPARE] button is a quick way to compare the edited sound to the original sound, even in Mix Voice edit.
To get the contemporary jazz guitar sound I am searching for, there are a few edits I am going to make on these pages, and all the edits can be seen in Fig. 7a and Fig 7b below:
Fig. 7a 
Fig. 7b 
I first wanted to change the pre amp device from distortion 2 to tube and the speaker from combo to twin. That gives me the sound I am searching for: A nice tube pre amp with a twin-cabinet speaker. Taking the overdrive up from 30% to 60% then changing the presence from 0 to +6 further defines the sound that I want. Now, for the final touches, I decided to change the delay, so I decreased DelayR from 400.0ms to 200.0 milliseconds, the feed back time (FBTime) to 400.1ms, the FBHi Damp to 0.1, the DistLvl to 30%, and the DlyMix to 7. Why, you might be wondering, did I do this? By employing the famous Duke Ellington axiom: "If it sounds good, it is good". It just sounded right to me. Now I am ready to do a few more edits.
One aspect of the sound that I am looking for is a more resonant, wider tone on the upper velocity of the sound. One way to attain this desired result is to edit the filter, and one way to do this is to change the overall common filter via the knob controls. A more detailed and precise way would be to edit the actual upper-velocity element. The "Jazzy Pick" voice that I am working has 4 elements within it. I know this by looking at the track buttons 9-12, which also function as element on/off buttons in voice edit mode. The screen shot below shows the Track Select/Element/Perf.Part/Zone buttons on the right hand side of the ES:
I can tell that there are 4 elements active by looking at the bottom row buttons: 9-12 have red lights on, meaning that they are active. Track select buttons 1-4 and 9-12 do double function in all the voice edit modes, and I can see that they are actually listed right on the front panel. ELEMENT/PERF.PART/ZONE are these button's functions in different modes. In any Voice Edit mode, Buttons 1-4 allow me to select an individual element for editing and buttons 9-12 allow me to mute out different elements so I can hear each one individually or compare them to each other. When I press any of the element select buttons (1-4), I am pointing at an element that I want to edit. If I wanted to hear just what that element sounds like, I must mute the other 3 elements. The element that I am going to do the filter edit to is element 3, so in order to select and isolate the sound, I need to select element 3 then turn off elements 1,2 and 4:
If I try playing this sound right now it will sound at the upper velocity level (if I press [SF3 LIMIT I can actually see what the lowest and highest velocity is). This is the element that I want to edit. The screen I now have looks like this:
Fig. 10 
To edit the filter, I press [F3] FILTER. This opens the filter setting for that voice. The edit I made was to the filter gain, cutoff frequency and resonance settings. What started out as this…
Fig. 11 
…became this:
Fig. 12
Now I turn the other three elements back on and check out the sound. By lowering the cutoff frequency of the low pass filter and boosting the resonance, I have achieved a more woody, full sound the sound "barks" a bit more when I really hit it. Trying to explain the difference is not nearly effective as hearing it: Check out the associated pattern file showing the difference between the sounds. It is a 2 section pattern file that contains the original "Jazzy Pick" voice in section A, track 2 vs. the new "bajazzpick" voice that I created here in section B, track 1. The backing tracks are the same in each section. I added the multiband compressor as a master effect and some system effects (The R3 Plate Reverb and the Stereo Vintage Phaser 1--which are both amazing effects…check them out!) to the entire mix as well. And each of the remaining voices in this sequence (drums, bass, electric piano, rhythm guitar, organ, and horn section) has 2 insert effects associated to them as well. There is an unprecedented amount of exceptionally high quality effect processing that is available.
Now that I have edited the sound I will want to save it, and this brings me to the overarching point of this article: The Mix Voice Feature. Before saving the sound I will name it "bajazzpick". Naming is a common parameter, so I first have to press the [COMMON] button (see figure 8 above). Pressing [SF1] gets me to the naming page, where I name voice "bajazzpick". Now I want to save the newly created voice to the associated pattern I am using. To do this I simply press [STORE]. Here is the screen I now have before me:
Fig. 13a  |
Fig. 13b  |
First I press enter, confirm the "Are you sure?" message and save my new mix voice. Now when I am ready to save the entire pattern file, I simply save the pattern (under [FILE/[F2] SAVE/TYPE:ALL PATTERN) and the new mix voice-or mix voices, depending on how many I have created-and that sound will load with the pattern the next time I load. When I press store and store the new Mix Voice, it is automatically placed both in my mix set and in a special voice bank (MSB 63, LSB 60 for those who understand bank select). This Bank has 16 locations per Song Mix and per Pattern Mix and is reserved for "Normal" Voice edits. I have the added flexibility to create new voices without overwriting any voices in the user voice banks. My music can be created with new sounds being created in tandem, and I never have to leave the Pattern or Song mode (not to mention my own creative mode).
This entire procedure is something that I return to time and time again on the Motif ES. Sometimes I do work with external sequencing software, and the ES fully supports computer based sequencing right out of the box, with built-in direct USB MIDI out put and MackieÔ/LogicÔ control protocols standard. Even cooler is optional mLAN16E mLAN audio and MIDI card, which allows the ES to become a 24-bit/96kHz audio interface to any firewire-equipped Windows XP or Apple OS computer . With that said, there are many, many times where I simply want to work within the ES alone when I don't want to boot up the computer, open a software sequencer and configure my connections. Being able to edit sounds directly from the Motif ES sequencing mode allows me to instantly check out voice edits within the context of the music, and that is a very cool thing.
When you press store and store the new Mix Voice, it is automatically placed both in your mix set and in a special voice bank (MSB 63, LSB 60 for those who understand bank select). This Bank has 16 locations per Song Mix and per Pattern Mix and is reserved for "Normal" Voice edits.
3 For more information about mLAN, check out http://www.mlancentral.com/mlan_info.php. For more information about the mLAN16E go to http://www.yamahasynth.com/products/mlan16e/index.html.
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