I thought I’d share an interesting but somewhat frustrating time I had recently trying to overcome the limitations of the Motif Classic’s note-shift abilities, in case it helps anyone else at some stage.

This sequence of events was all started by the fact that the Classic can only transpose notes for a part by plus or minus 24 in Performance mode. I don’t know why some keyboard manufacturers do this—it wouldn’t be any trouble to make it 36 or 48, which would be a lot more flexible.

Anyway, I have a Performance patch where I need to play the standard Motif violin sound in the upper octaves, and a synth sound in the lower. Ideally I would have transposed the violin sound down 3 octaves, but as two octaves is the most I can shift it, I have to play lower down on the keyboard, and this means less keys available for the synth part, which means I can’t do a melody with the synth sound that I really wanted to do.

So I decided that I should be able to get around this by just transposing the violin voice itself down an octave, allowing me to play the violin part an octave higher on the keyboard in Performance mode, opening up more keys for the synth part. But here’s the other annoying thing about the Classic. You can’t just transpose or note-shift a voice (although the plug-in voices let you do just that—how I wish they’d done this for the on-board voices as well!).

But there is an option to change the pitch of the elements of a voice, and so I did that with all the four elements of this violin voice. That did put it down an octave, and it did appear to provide a solution to my original problem—except that now some of the violin notes in the middle of the range (where I played a lot) sounded really awful!

I worked out that what was going on was this. Elements 1 and 2 handled the upper half of the violin’s range, G2 and above, and elements 3 and 4 the lower range, F#2 and below. Elements 1 and 3 provide the main sounds, and 2 and 4 provide a pizzicato attack. Now, the sample sets used by elements 1 and 3 are entirely distinct, although they match up pretty well in terms of sound around the initial split point. But I had changed that split point, and now element 1 was handling the notes G1 to F#2, whereas before element 3 was doing so. And element 1 sounded rubbish in regard to those notes. Either the samples themselves were just weak, or else the samples stopped at G2 and pitch-shifting at the sample level was being used to create notes below G2. (It sounded to me like the latter.)

So what I needed was to get element 3 (and 4) handling that range again, while keeping them an octave down.

I worked out that I could change the ranges for each element (using Osc—Limit), raising the lower limit for elements 1 and 2, and the upper limit for elements 3 and 4, by an octave. And this worked—elements 3 and 4 went back to handling the range G1 to F#2, and I no longer had that dreadful-sounding octave.

But something was still not quite right. The lower notes produced by elements 3 and 4 sounded slightly different than they had done originally—they sounded a bit thinner. There was a definite change in timbre when I went from G2 to F#2 (where the sample sets switched). It wasn’t terrible, and was just about useable, but it was there, and noticeable, and I didn’t know why—shouldn’t it all be the same as it originally was, only with me playing an octave higher?

I looked at every other parameter in Edit mode that involved reference to a note, and I put those notes all up an octave as well, but none of those changes made any difference. I also increased the volume for elements 3 and 4, which helped a bit, but wasn’t it.

Eventually through trial and error I worked out that the best solution was to decrease the HPFCutoff value (in Filter—Type) for element 3. This has made the sound pretty close to what it was before. So success at last! And all because of a lack of flexibility in the Motif’s transpose options!

I can only hope that later models give you more control over these sorts of things, although I’ve had a brief look through the XS manual—transpose for a performance part is still set at only two octaves? Why? My Roland module doesn’t have this limitation. At least, by the looks of things, a voice can now be transposed by two octaves as well, which will greatly help (as long as this makes changes merely at the MIDI level, ie. changing the key-to-note mapping).

Re: Getting around transpose limitations the hard way

perhaps we can offer you a different solution.

Within a Voice you can Coarse tune the Elements so that you can prepare a Voice to be used in a Performance. If I follow your post you started down this path because you would ideally like to have the violin sound down 3 octaves.

Try this:
Call up the Violin
Press [EDIT]
Press Track Select 1 to view Element parameters
Press [F2] PITCH
Press [SF1] TUNE

http://files.keyfax.com/forums/user-files/430122-PitchTune.JPG

Here you can tune each Element up or down 4 octaves (+48 ~ 0 ~ -48)
Tune each Element as you desire
[STORE] your newly pitched-down version of the violin in a USER location and use it in your PERFORMANCE. 

And if you don’t want to EDIT Voices at the Element level, you can simply Copy your PERFORMANCE to a SONG MIXNG or PATTERN MIXING setup or just start to build your Split/Layer in a MIXING setup.

Place each PART on a separate MIDI channel and create your SPLIT using MASTER mode. MASTER mode can address the MIXING setup on four separate MIDI channels (4 ZONES), each Zone can be Note Shifted up to 3 Octaves up or down. This way you do not have to Edit and Store a new Voice.

For more on this see the Behind the Manual article:  Understanding Motif’s Master Mode

Hope that helps.

Re: Getting around transpose limitations the hard

>Within a Voice you can Coarse tune the Elements so that you can prepare a Voice to be used in a Performance

But this is exactly what I did! My post was basically a description of some of the inadequacies of this method. If you read it carefully you will see that using this method isn’t as straightforward as you might think.