Hi team,

I love my MOX8, except for one small thing. I really hate the sound of the F, F#, G, and G# notes just below middle A, for the Full Concert Grand piano voice. For some reason they sound boxy or out of phase. It’s similar to what you hear after recording MIDI and forgetting to turn off the Local control - you get that dual voice trigger, which is sort of phase thing as far as I know.

I hear this when playing through my Steinberg UR-44 sound interface-->Yamaha HS-8 monitors or my SoundCraft Mixer to Bose L1 Compacts - not exactly crappy gear.

I know what the frequencies are for these VERY offending note sounds. Can anyone give me an idea how to fix these four notes? I know it’s very subjective, but I would wager you’d hear a similar sound on your MOX8 if you listen carefully. I have the Editor VST Standalone working. Can it be used? Much obliged :).

- Lee

There’s no way to apply EQ to individual notes...it’s all or nothing.

Open up the editor and see what waveforms are used for that voice. Then check some of the other piano voices and see which ones use those same waveforms. See if they have the same problem with those notes.

If they do, it’s baked into the samples. If not you might be able to do something in the editor, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Hey Meatball,

Many thanks for chiming in. I figured as much. You have at least given me a good place to start. I’ll give it a whirl. Thanks again.

Lee,

I noticed this and was able to sort out that the wave form has a defect in it in that range.
Yamaha uses just one waveform spread over those notes.
I found that this same fault was present in the same exact piano in my Tyros3, which no doubt was the exact same waveform in both instruments.
I recorded each note and used a graphic analyzer to display the recorded wave - it was very plain to see.
I at first thought my Tyros 3 was defective and returned it for repair only to be told by the service man he could not find anything wrong.
Because my hearing is different, I let the matter drop.

Lots of luck solving the problem.
I suggest finding another piano voice with a different wave form and going from there.

Bill G

As always Bill, you’re a wealth of knowledge! At least I now know that it’s not my speakers or hearing. That’s a good idea to select a different piano voice, and then EQ it to a Concert Grand. I’ll take a look at the other pianos and see what I can find. Many thanks my friend!!

Lee Batchelor - 03 August 2016 04:45 PM

Hi team,

I love my MOX8, except for one small thing. I really hate the sound of the F, F#, G, and G# notes just below middle A, for the Full Concert Grand piano voice. For some reason they sound boxy or out of phase. It’s similar to what you hear after recording MIDI and forgetting to turn off the Local control - you get that dual voice trigger, which is sort of phase thing as far as I know.

I hear this when playing through my Steinberg UR-44 sound interface-->Yamaha HS-8 monitors or my SoundCraft Mixer to Bose L1 Compacts - not exactly crappy gear.

I know what the frequencies are for these VERY offending note sounds. Can anyone give me an idea how to fix these four notes? I know it’s very subjective, but I would wager you’d hear a similar sound on your MOX8 if you listen carefully. I have the Editor VST Standalone working. Can it be used? Much obliged :).

- Lee

The artifacts and noises in some of the XF/XS/MOXF/MOX acoustic piano VOICES are often an integral part of the original sample, and have been discussed in numerous threads over the years, such as This One.

You can use the various EQs in the machine to mitigate them, but you cannot eliminate them if they are in fact “baked into the samples” as meatballfulton so succinctly stated.

Fortunately, there are not that many of them, and they affect only a few notes.

I have managed to EQ-around some of these bad acoustic piano samples (and VOICES that use them) a bit, but since I use a slab piano in my rig, which doesn’t have these issues, it hasn’t been that high a priority for me on my XF.

Thanks for chiming in, cmayhle.

Interesting read from your link. It seems most sound anomalies are subjective. I have heard that companies often sample one particular note, and then transpose it up or down a few steps to create the adjacent notes. The alternative is to sample every white and black note individually for a near perfect sound. I assume that would require a lot more memory than is afforded us on a MOX8.

In Canada, the MOX8 retailed for about $1,895 on first release - not bad for what it does. I praise Yamaha for making a “road/gigging” version of the fully loaded Motif equivalent. The sound engine is identical and it weighs half of the full version. I really hate the AC adapter for fear of a failure just prior to a show, however, they are only about $30, so keeping a spare in the road box is cheap insurance.

I can live with four notes that sound a little less than desired. I’ll play around with the various filters - an area in which I have never ventured. The nice thing is you can’t break anything, especially if you create an All file first :).

Lee Batchelor - 05 August 2016 08:06 AM

I have heard that companies often sample one particular note, and then transpose it up or down a few steps to create the adjacent notes. The alternative is to sample every white and black note individually for a near perfect sound. I assume that would require a lot more memory than is afforded us on a MOX8.

This is exactly the case. Some early sampled pianos would use one sample to cover a full octave! The ideal is one per note at as many velocity levels as possible, the reality in most synths is stretching one sample across 2 or 3 notes.

The MOX has 355MB of samples total, not just the pianos.

The Korg Kronos by comparison has 4GB just for the factory piano, but it has to stream it off an SSD disk..it’s much too large to fit into RAM all at once.

The Ivory II VST (software) piano sample set is 77GB.

The Fazzioli Extreme Grand (Kontakt library) is 71,588 samples taking up 162GB. There’s one sample per note times one sample for each of the 127 MIDI velocity levels times up to 16 layers for staccato fingering...over 2,000 samples per note!! It comes preloaded on a hard drive! This costs $500 and you need to own Kontakt as well, another $400 or so.

Lee Batchelor - 03 August 2016 04:45 PM

I love my MOX8, except for one small thing. I really hate the sound of the F, F#, G, and G# notes just below middle A… [snip]

I have never tried to “surgically” edit a voice on the MOX, and you’d probably need the Melas editor to do this… but I wonder if it would be possible to somehow omit those four notes from the voice… essentially creating a “hole” in the voice where nothing sounds?  Then, to fill them back in, take your A and tune it down two half-steps for the G and G#, then take your E and raise them two half-steps for the F and F#.  You’d probably have to do these 4 notes at the Element level(?)

You could probably test if the results would be satisfactory by temporarily detuning the entire instrument in half-steps to see if the G and G# sounds “better” as a detuned A than the original “boxy” sounds?  Similarly for the other two notes, RAISE the tuning by a couple half-steps and listen to the E.

Just a crazy left-field suggestion…

Hi Tritone,

That’s an interesting idea. Not sure how you “insert” new notes to fill in the holes, but if it’s possible, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. Can you give some quick instructions on where to start?

I toyed with Bill Grosse’s idea of using another piano voice, and then applying the correct EQ to make it sound like a Concert Grand. The only unaffected sample is the Monoaural piano (Button A16 in the Keyboard set). Makes me suspicious that the sample may be all right but the stereo imagining has thrown something out of phase (or in phase). It definitely sounds like what you hear when recording MIDI and two identical notes sound at the same time.