Sunday 27 September 2015

Yamaha PSR-S970 - Use FC7 pedal to control Wah Wah

This took some working out - I saw Yamaha do it in a Demo video but could I get it to work - No was the simple answer.

However, I now know how to do it, if you want to listen to a video using it for Right hand Guitar Voice here's my version of Le Freak .

Please excuse the quality of the pictures, I used my phone to capture them.
There are two steps to setting this up, first you set up the DSP then you set the pedal.

To set the DSP - Select a Wah Guitar then underneath the display select "Effect Type", Set DSP 4 to Right 1 to modulate the Right 1 instrument.
Then select MODULATION as the Category, and PEDAL WAH as the type




If you press EXIT at this point you can set up the parameters on the Amp emulation



I saved my setting to a preset (Press button G - SAVE)

Now, set up the pedal, press FUNCTION and button D - CONTROLLER



 In this case I have an FC5 footswitch as Pedal 1 and an FC7 as pedal 2, select FC7 pedal with Button A or B, Scroll down to PEDAL CONTROL (WAH).

DONE !

You can add a 2nd Right instrument, just make sure you edit the DSP4 to say RIGHT 2 as the assignment , there are several Wah options such as VCM Pedal Wah Disco.




Have FUN !

Thursday 24 September 2015

Yamaha PSR-S970 - Creating custom PPI pack with Yamaha Expansion Manager (Ubuntu)

I've got the Expansion manager running great using WINE so it was time to work out how to merge more than one pack together, my previous keyboard (PSR-S650) could have one Expansion pack installed at any time, the S970 has 512Mb of memory so can have more packs installed at once (if they are merged into one).

I also wanted to see if I could bring in some of the style tracks from my old S650 packs.

Importing packs is easy enough, you just click on the +, locate your Pack Project File .ppf and it's imported.

I also found I could locate my old S650 packs which are .YEP format.

Some instruments could not be imported as they were using a different format but that was OK.

The question now is how to export these out in a file format that I can load into the S970.

The sparse Expansion Manager  user guide mentions loading your instrument info file.
I found this is located in the System / Owner screen.


Just OK the question and save to USB , this will save a file with the correct .n27 suffix file (your instrument info file)

Launch the Expansion Manager, on the left select the + next to install Target , then select the "import instrument info".


Locate your .n27 file


This will be imported into the Expansion Manager.

The Install target will show your instrument name, after a few seconds this will colour in a purple colour.


You now have the instrument programmed into the Expansion Manager.

To import expansion packs remember to select MY PACKS at the top left, this gives you the option to click + and import etc.
You can save files and custom pack settings in MY PACKS but can't use them in the instrument.

To do this click the PSR-S970 on the left, you now have the option to select multiple packs (Green tick), or deselect them. You can also highlight files within the packs and exclude/include.

You now select "Save as Pack Install File"


When you save the pack you need to add the ".ppi" on the end, otherwise you can't load it in the keyboard so just check it's there before you transfer the file to the USB pen drive.

Insert the drive, Press the Function button, select the pack, in this case I've added several of my S650 packs so there are 14 packs merged into one.


Once installed the keyboard will restart.

Voices and Styles are there - I wouldn't expect everything to work, after all I've imported some files from an older keyboard but they are there, it's just a case of keeping note if anything does not work, then you can customize the pack a little more in the Expansion Manager and load it on the keyboard which will remove the items which you don't like or don't work.



Yamaha Expansion Manager (YEM) - using WINE (Ubuntu)

Yamaha publish the Expansion Manager for Tyros and the PSR series, with this you can merge Expansion packs together, create voices and drums then save as a custom expansion pack.

I downloaded version 2.3.1 for Windows, on my Ubuntu PC I have WINE installed.

Double click the EXE and it installs fine, no errors.

Run the Expansion Manager icon on the desktop and it works great, as a test I created a pack mixing the Europe and Mexico expansion.









Saturday 29 August 2015

My Yamaha PSR-S970 experience so far from Rimmers Music

I've not had a good start to my experience.

The dealer I chose to supply it (Rimmers Music @ Blackburn) had sent me a mail yesterday saying it was being delivered today and a courier reference.

Entering the courier reference gives me a "not found" message and it's now way outside the window they would deliver.

To say I'm not impressed is an understatement and I've no confidence in them now for my future purchases, my daughter wants a Fender Jaguar and I'll be sure to exclude them from my choices, even if they are a bit cheaper.

I'll probably end up with my 970 sometime next week, I've already got a buyer for my PSR-S650 and he's collecting it next Saturday so things could be interesting, I'll have to play the comb and tissue paper for a couple of days at this rate ......


Yamaha PSR-S650 USR Registrations

I'm switching to a Yamaha PSR-S970 today so I thought I would share my registrations I've saved with the S650.

Each USR file is saved with a registration for a song, please note the registration file will over write all 8 banks in the keyboard so be sure to save your registrations first using the file menu.

Copy the USR file(s) to the USER FILES folder on your USB thumb drive, load the USR file through the files menu.

Here's the location of my Registration files - one is called BLANK, this will load with just a piano in Registration bank 1, preset 1.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0i61ACEKeL_d1VTRFNTVEVLMjQ/view?usp=sharing

Saturday 7 February 2015

Pi 2 - Happy Valentines

The Raspberry Pi 2 has hit the stores and my wife uses mine as a media PC using XBMC so I got her one for Valentines (who says True Loves dead?) - she knows about it and was really keen to get one.

The Pi 2 takes a micro SD so I grabbed a spare one, I also noticed RaspBmc is posted end of life, in favour of OSMC (Open Source Media Center)

I went over to their download section https://osmc.tv/download/linux/ and installed the OSMC installer in linux, this seems a great idea as you have a dedicated installer so it's handy when you need to wipe or reprogram the unit.

I followed the Ubuntu/Xubuntu 12.04 info as my server runs 12.04 LTS.

As a tip, add the GPG key first, this saves you getting errors because the public key isn't qualified i.e execute these two lines first.

wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:osmc/xUbuntu_12.04/Release.key
sudo apt-key add - < Release.key 
 
Once that's done you just need to grab the rest of the code to install the OSMC installer (check the web site though as through time the link below will change).

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/osmc/xUbuntu_12.04/ /' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/osmc-installer.list"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install osmc-installer
 
At this point you launch the installer, it's very straight forwards, it is all graphical and you just need to select your SD card, confirm you want to install, it wiped the card and put the files on in just a couple of minutes.

On powering up the Pi 2 it only takes a couple of minutes to completely install OSMC and Kodi, I'll have a play now and see what's what.

So far though I would say to try out OSMC and the new Pi 2 looks very nippy, boot time is really quick and it zips through menus.