Casio to Mac to iPad to Yamaha

[Greg Barker]

Its been a while, but I assure you I've been lurking since I was last active.

I find myself in need of digging a little deeper into tech aspects of keyboards. My 88 year-old father is starting to get cabin fever from quarantines in his senior residence. To give him some more to focus on mentally, we have agreed to work on a duet from a book that we worked on together 20+ years ago. We know we aren't going to try simultaneous play over the Internet, but want to practice for when we can get together in-person again and want to be able to record and share both parts of a duet for each of us to use in practice.

I have a Casio Previa PX160 and MacBook Pro running Catalina. My dad has a Yamaha Clavinova and uses an iPad.

I've figured out how to move recorded files from my keyboard to Mac, and discovered the files are useless to anything but another Casio keyboard, no joy there. The Audio MIDI Setup on my Mac recognizes the Casio, but I have been unsuccessful at actually getting anything to go into GarageBand, I suspect because the Audio MIDI Setup is expecting audio input and I'm connected using a USB cable.

I'm not finding much useful information on the Internet, and didn't see anything specific to this in the Forum's archives, so I'm posing this as a new thread. What should be my next general steps to play one of the duet's parts and send it to my dad so he can use it to practice the other part? USB or audio cables? Software?

Thanks. I hope all of you are well. - Greg

 

[anotherscott]

To send MIDI out of the Casio, use USB. To send audio out of the Casio, use the Line Outs.

 

[Greg Barker]

To send MIDI out of the Casio, use USB. To send audio out of the Casio, use the Line Outs.

Okay, that makes sense. Which would you choose to do to accomplish my objective?

 

[SeaGtGruff]

If you decide to send MIDI, you might need to worry about the differences between your Casio and his Yamaha. Basic MIDI isn't brand-specific, but the messages that select the patches and set the patch parameters will have to use different values depending on whether they're supposed to be playing on the Casio or the Yamaha.

If you decide to send audio, those differences won't matter.

 

[Greg Barker]

Thanks, Michael. Further research indicates that GarageBand does not export to MIDI files without the use of additional software. It will, however, receive MIDI input and export to MP3. I also found a tutorial for making the settings in GarageBand to connect a MIDI keyboard (which I did not have the first time I tried). It looks like the path of least resistance will be to use a MIDI interface to GarageBand and output and send MP3 files. That gives us both more playback flexibility. We can use smart phones or tablets to play one part while practicing the other rather than dealing with getting the part into the keyboard's memory.

Of course, other suggestions will be gratefully accepted.

 

[Old Master Tech]

I hope your dad is doing OK. Kudos to you for taking the time!!