Is there a certain way to set up my S90 when using it as a sound module to minimize latency in playing and recording midi tracks on my computer.
Today I played a medium tempo rock type block chord track, added a bass, copied the piano track to another track in my computer sequencer and added rhodes.
When I went to record a kik and rim on the next track, the S90 began to choke and latency began.
So I only had 4 midi channels used on the S90 which I think is 64 polyphony.
Are there any menus that I should look at to resolve this?
I have other older synths and modules which have even less polyphony and don’t do this. Is it the nature of how Yamaha software works?
Thanks a lot for your help!
Billy T

Re: S 90 and Midi

Surprise, surprise, you probably exceeded the polyphony!!
If you used the sustain pedal with the piano and the rhodes you almost certainly overran the 62 note poly for the instrument.

Ways to overcome this:
Use your DAW to edit your performances to use less notes

Use your DAW to record the midi as audio and then mute the MIDI.

Use alternate sounds - the way some of the sounds are set up internally mean they are more note hungry than others.

Get the PF or AP PLG board - the PF will give you a wide range of very useable pianos and rhodes etc and will give you one extra voice with its own 64 note poly. The AP board adds a higher quality piano and one extra voice with its own 32 note poly. In this way, you could use either board (AP or PF) for your piano sound and then free up the S90 to handle the other Rhodes, Bass and Drums.

There are probably other solutions (like get an S90ES or even a Mo ES Rack) which would get you more polyphony, but which would add significantly to the cost.

Hope these thoughts at least help some

Cheers

Re: S 90 and Midi

Thanks for the info. I do have an S90ES also. I leave it in the case for gigs however.
I have not experienced this latency with older stuff I have like O1 W or T2 Korg, or X5dr Korg, KORG< KORG!
Enough KORG.
There must be a different way of addressing the voices. On the korg stuff if you exceed the number of voices, it seems to take away the earliest ones and thereby addressing the latency on input and playback.
Oh well, at least there are options.
Thanks,
billy t

Re: S 90 and Midi

Billy,

you can help matters by being aware of a couple things:

Note priority is given to Midi in this order:
Ch 10 first, then Ch 1 then ch 2 then 3 and so on. Obviously drums get priority.

A further reason that the older stuff didn’t choke so quickly is that a lot of the voices on the S90 are using stereo samples - this eats notes twice as quickly! I had the same issue when moving MIDI sequences prepared for an old Yamaha W7 to my Motif classic.

You can sometimes find that the GM voices give you a little more polyphonic elbow room and still work well in a mix context.

Of course the motif classic had a work around all this by including a sampler - you could resample a busy drum part and play back the sample with the midi drum part muted, thus using only 2 notes of poly. You could repeat this for various other busy parts, freeing up polyphony, but of course limited to 64 Mb of sample space! THe S90 lacks the sampler so this work around is unfortunately not available to you (though the DAW route still may be)

Cheers