Possible to Extract Sound Patches from Ableton/VSTi plug-ins Into Keyboard Sound Banks?

[senturion]

Not sure if the title makes sense, but I have been using Ableton with Native Instruments Komplete library plugins with a midi controller for live performance for some time. The problem is the setup isn't always simple. Rather than setting up a laptop, audio interface, extra power for those and the keyboards etc, I'd rather just have the keyboards only using the patches I made in Massive and FM8 and whatever combination of samples I use in Kontakt.

I started thinking tonight - does a more advanced keyboard today exist that can allow me to "import" my own patches I have on my laptop into a sound bank on the keyboard itself? I mean, it is 2018. I'm sure most everybody these days uses a laptop with a keyboard and just uses the midi function. Given that, does a newer keyboard (not just a midi controller) exist that can record the audio of patches I'll use for a given performance from my laptop, and then store the recording of those samples on the keyboard's internal SSD storage? If such a keyboard doesn't exist I'm going to ask Yamaha, Korg or M-Audio to get crackin'.

I'd like to just use a keyboard and have it use the patches I've already paid thousands of dollars for over the years. Rather than using the cheaper internal sounds that some keyboards have these days. I'd rather know all the sounds I have on my laptop than relearn whatever new keyboard in 2020 has. Just let me use my own sounds and store them on the board.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

This would be a two-phase process.

First you must record samples of the patches you want to use. For best results you'd probably want multiple samples for each MIDI note-- i.e., for MIDI Note 0 you'd probably want different samples using different note velocities, and likewise for MIDI Note 1, MIDI Note 2, etc., up through MIDI Note 127. That might not be as bad as it sounds, because once you've added the various Note events for MIDI Note 0 in your DAW's piano roll editor, you can copy and paste them, moving them up a semitone on the piano roll editor; then copy the Note events for both of those, paste, and move them up to Note 2 and Note 3; etc. After seven iterations of this you would have all 128 MIDI notes. Then it would simply be a question of choosing the patch you want to use for that MIDI track, and record it to an audio track. After that you'd still need to chop the recording up into all of the individual samples, and assemble them into a soundfont or something like that.

The second phase would be importing the soundfont or other sample format into the target keyboard for use as a custom voice. Not all keyboards can handle that, so you'd want to do your homework about which models from which manufacturers can load new voices, as well as whether you can create your own custom voices for that keyboard. For instance, some Yamaha models use the Yamaha Expansion Manager (YEM) software to load new voices, and I believe you can use YEM to create your own voices if you know how. I'm not familiar with how to use that software myself, nor am I familiar with what's available from other manufacturers.

But it is doable, although it would take a bit of work with the proper software, as well as a suitable keyboard.