How to remove vibrato from MX88

[ttennis]

Since I am new here, let me first slightly introduce myself. I am a retired Television, Electronics engineer(?) and an avid table tennis fanatic.

I am almost a total novice to music, but there is a song that I have loved from childhood and needed a piano to learn to play it. I bought a Yamaha MX88 and it works fine, except that I do not like the fact that when I select strings, I am getting a lot of vibrato. The song has a violin section which has no vibrato. Does anyone know how to remove or reduce the vibrato on an MX88?

 

[SeaGtGruff]

I think your best bet might be to look for a strings/violin voice that doesn't have vibrato, or at least has a minimum of it. If you can't find one you like among the included preset voices, you can download a few free voice packs for the MX from Yamaha MusicSoft.

The MX doesn't have the ability to load new sound samples, but you can load or create "user voices" from the existing voice elements-- the basic sound samples from which the preset voices and those "new" voices you can get from Yamaha MusicSoft are formed. If you want to try your hand at creating your own user voices from the available elements, there is a program-- or suite of programs-- from John Melas that lets you do just that.

John Melas MOTIF Site (jmelas.gr)

 

[anotherscott]

SSG is right, you need to look through the strings sounds to find one without vibrato, you can't edit it out. This is because Yamaha uses two methods for vibrato on these instruments. ..

...One is that they use a recorded sample that includes no vibrato, and any desired vibrato is subsequently artifically added by the player during performance, for example using the modulation wheel (though some boards also allow you to add this with a pedal or with aftertouch which is just pressing harder on the key).

...The second method is that they record the sample with the player's own vibrato. The advantage is that it is more natural sounding than using an LFO to vary the pitch of a sampled sound, both because of the player's technique and also because it will no longer be the case that every note you play will have the exact same vibrato. But the trade-off is, in this case, that recorded vibrato is permanently part of the sound. It's in the recording, that's why you can't edit it out. But I would be very surprised if the MX did not have an alternate string sound that did not have vibrato recorded into it, in which case it will have no vibrato unless your mod wheel is up.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Just to add to what @anotherscott said, some of the raw strings samples (or "elements" as Yamaha calls them) might have little-to-no vibrato in them, but others may have at least some vibrato that's embedded within the samples because that's how the strings were being played when they were sampled.

But Yamaha does use a number of voice parameters that relate to vibrato and other types of modulation, such as how much of a delay there should be after playing a note before the vibrato kicks in, how fast the vibrato is, and how "deep" it is. These parameters are more about adding "unnatural" or artificial vibrato to voices that doesn't have naturally-occurring vibrato in their raw samples, but it's possible that some of the strings voices that have a lot of vibrato in them don't actually have that much vibrato in their raw samples-- that the natural vibrato has been artificially enhanced using the vibrato-related voice parameters. If that's the case, the only way to change those voice parameters to remove the unnaturally-added vibrato is to edit the voices in a suitable program (such as the ones from John Melas) and save the modified settings as a new user voice.

But in the long run, the best option is to hunt for voice elements that have very little if any natural vibrato.

 

[anotherscott]

SGG, I don't believe I've ever heard any "hybrid" strings on a Yamaha, i.e. combining (recorded) vibrato with non-vibrato samples in the same patch. I think it would sound bad, and I think that adding LFO-generated vibrato to a sample that had vibrato in it would be unlikley to produce pleasant results. I really think the most likely solution here is to simply select a voice that doesn't have vibrato recorded as part of the sample. The higher end Yamahs definitely have both kinds of Voices in them, I'd be surprised if the MX did not as well.