Could someone tell me if you can split the keyboard into 3 voices. Like one voice in lower keys, one in middle, and one different one on top?

Related question, how do you add an effect, or change it in one of the voices on a split keyboard? For instance want to have kick drum voice on low keys and add more reverb to it, but top voice , piano, does not need it.

Please need simple explanations for a “not too savvy user”

Could someone tell me if you can split the keyboard into 3 voices. Like one voice in lower keys, one in middle, and one different one on top?

The short answer is YES, but in the terminology of the MOXF it is not referred to as a “split"…

A SPLIT in the Yamaha-speak, is when the keyboard is divided into two sections, an UPPER and a LOWER. This designation is made because of the ‘quick access’ to SPLITs via the PERFORMANCE CREATOR necessitated this difference.

You can region the keyboard into as many regions as you desire using the PART parameters. NOTE LIMIT LOW and NOTE LIMIT HIGH are the PART parameters that facilitate dividing the keyboard as you desire. In the PERFORMANCE mode you can set NOTE LIMITS for as many as four PARTS, in the SONG and PATTERN MIXING modes you can set the NOTE LIMITS for all sixteen PARTS as you may require.

But technically speaking in the terminology of the MOXF manuals, you can SPLIT the keyboard into an UPPER and LOWER region without entering edit (via the QUICK ACCESS: PERFORMANCE CREATOR feature). However, if you press [EDIT] and work with individual PART parameters you can divide the keyboard as your question outlines.

From PERFORMANCE or SONG/PATTERN MIXING
Press [EDIT]
Press the PART number [1]-[4] or [1]-[16] to view PART parameters
Press [F1] VOICE
Press [SF3] LIMIT
Set the Limits as you require.

In SONG/PATTERN MIXING mode you will additionally have to set the PARTS you want to play simultaneously to the same MIDI channel.

I tried the above. Having problems.  Does it make any difference if you create a performance with 3 voices that I want to split into 3 parts on keyboard, by creating “layer” with all 3 voices’ or using"split".
I tried both ways, and when I went to edit,then parts, and tried to set upper and lower limits
, it seemed to work somewhat, but not totally correctly. I never could get it to work correctly and get the splits right where I wanted them to be. It either would not seem to “recognize” the limits I set, or despite setting what looked correct, I would get areas on board that played nothing.

Specifically, I am trying to get Hybrid EP voice on top, a bass in lower keys, and drum voices on the very low part of keyboard.

davidtre - 01 February 2014 10:14 AM

I tried the above. Having problems.

I think what you’re missing is that the Layer and Split buttons are designed for quick creation of sets of TWO sounds. Yes, you can then further edit the result to create a third sound, but in the long run, I think you’re better off ignoring the Layer and Split buttons, and instead just create a 3 part Performance from scratch, rather than trying to create a 3 part Performance by editing a 2 part Performance that was created via the Split/Layer buttons.

The important distinction in B_M’s message that you may be missing is that the Split button creates an Upper and Lower section, while Performances can divide the keyboard into up to 4 regions, defined by High and Low Note Limits. Those are entirely different things! So when you create a split with the Split button, you have an Upper and Lower section, but when you attempt to Edit the resulting Performance to add a third part, you now must deal with those existing Upper and Lower sections AND with the Note Limits for each of the sounds. This is the reason you get, for example, “areas on board that played nothing” - essentially that is a conflict between the Upper/Lower distinction (created by the Split button) and the Note Limits you are manipulating in your edits. If you avoid the Split button completely, you no longer have to deal with Upper and Lower distinction, you can just deal with the Note Limits.

So forget the Split button. If you want to use more than two sounds, go to an available Performance slot where you want to store the results, Initialize and Edit it (i.e. press, Job, Enter, Enter, Edit, and then make the settings for the 3 or 4 parts). You’re going to end up on that screen anyway, hitting the Split button first just adds more stuff you have to work around.

But if you have existing Splits you want to use as a foundation for a 3 or 4 part Performance, you can also go to Performance Edit and turn the SplitSwitch off (page 59 of the reference manual). You’ll lose the initial split point that was defined with the Split button, but you’ll retain the sounds, and you’ll avoid the conflict between that split point and the Note Limit ranges you need to define for the various Parts.

BTW, this was something that really bit me early on, too. I thought the Split button was a “shortcut” to creating a two part Performance the same way I would have done it “manually” (or on a Motif), and that I would have been able to continue to easily edit from there, but the two-part Performance that the Split button creates is done an entirely different way, by introducing the concept of Upper and Lower sections (which AFAIK did not exist on the Motif), instead of by assigning the two sounds using the Note Limit parameters. I don’t know why they introduced what I see as that unnecessary complication. Maybe there’s some useful flexibility there, or maybe there was some architectural difficulty in having the Split button create a split using what had been the existing Performance parameters such that they had to come up with new additional parameters, but yeah, it took me a while to figure out what was going on!

This post is SO valuable.

It was driving me nuts that the Performance I made using the Split button was completely ignoring the upper/lower note limits I was editing.

Doesn’t seem like a good design, but at least now I know what’s going on.

Whether you see it as a good design really depends on how you discover it. Before the quick “Performance Creator” there was no way to “on the fly” make a quick split. You always had to go into (full) EDIT and map out what you wanted to do with the Note Limit High and Note Limit Low settings per Part.

First, introduced on the S-series (Stage Synthesizers) the Performance Creator function answered the many requests from those who perform “live” and require “on the fly” splitting and layering control.

Once you discover that the PART parameters can be used to subdivide the keyboard on a deeper level, then you can forgive the function that is the “quick access”, upper/lower, simple split function required by the “on-the-fly” players.

I think if you only have the in depth edit method, the “on-the-fly” folks have a legitimate gripe.
But I think once you see what is going on, and that the word “split” literally meaning an Upper and Lower division, referencing a single Key as the divide.

So when the Split function is set to ON, there is a single KEY that determines whether a Part is going to sound above that point (Upper), or below that point (Lower) or will sound across the keyboard (Both).

In PERFORMANCE
Press [EDIT]
Press [COMMON]
Press [F1] GENERAL
Press [SF2] PLAY MODE
This is where it is determined whether your NOTE LIMIT HIGH/LOW settings are respected, or whether the (single) SPLIT POINT is respected.

When the SPLIT SWITCH is active, each additional PART that you activate can be set to “Upper”, “Lower”, or “Both"… as a Part Edit parameter. [F1] VOICE, [SF2] MODE

Obviously when you need to define an additional region… It is no longer a “split” (by definition), you would need to deactivate the Split Point function, and reference the NOTE LIMITs found in the Part parameters.

Make sense?

This is why we say, it’s not really bad design so much as it is trying to accommodate two approaches… This is often what occurs in mature interfaces… they ultimately include or grow to include several approaches.

Hope that helps.