Tyros 5 Midi issue

[Dumpster]

Hello! I'm racking my brains on this one, and really hope someone can help me.

I used to make music on the Amiga using Protracker (not necessarily relevant to this problem but you'll see why I mention it). I recently started to convert my old Protracker music to Midi, and I'm using a program to do this automatically. What this does is it creates a 16 channel Midi file, with each individual instrument mapped to its own channel. Channel 1 is my bass guitar, Channel 2 is a Snare and so on.

When I load this Midi file into the Tyros 5, they sound as terrible as you would expect (every channel is a piano!), but I can transpose the channels to the correct key and re-voice the instruments, and I can make a brilliant sounding version of my old songs, using the lovely instrument sounds of the Tyros. The problem is, when I save the Midi file all my changes save - apart from the re-voicing, which only survives until I turn the power off. I have searched online and seen official Yamaha videos explaining what to do and it all works beautifully for them, but all the voices change back after a power off when I do it.

My process is:

Load the midi file.
Listen to channel 1, transpose if needed to get the channel into the appropriate octave.
Press Mixing Console button until it shows "Mixing Console - Song (Ch 1-8)" on the screen.
Select Channel 1. Change the voice. Adjust Balance as needed. Get channel to sound how i want to it.
Repeat the above with Channels 2 - 16.
Then....
Go into Song Creator.
Tab across to Channel.
Select Option 5 (Setup)
Tick all the boxes.
Execute.
Save.

The music sounds great. I power off, Power back on, reload the saved Midi file and everything sounds like a piano again. Please - what am i doing wrong?

 

[SeaGtGruff]

If you have a Windows computer, you might consider trying a free utility called MixMaster:

Bedesem/Volbragt - MixMaster

It has a built-in knowledge of Yamaha's XG messages and other Yamaha SysEx messages, and was designed for working on song files and style files for Yamaha arrangers such as the Tyros and PSR-S models. You can load a MIDI song file, view its MIDI event list and change, add, or delete any events as needed, view and modify the setup of each song channel, verify whether the voices used on each channel are valid for your instrument and change them as needed, and so forth, then save your changes.

I have no personal experience with the Genos, Tyros, PSR-S, or high-level PSR models, so I don't know what you might be doing wrong, but I've seen posts in other forums from users who had trouble changing the voices in a song file using their keyboard's panel controls and menu options, so apparently it's a tricky operation and if you don't do everything exactly right then your changes won't get saved.

 

[Dumpster]

I'm still struggling with this one year on. All the changes I make to the midi track are saving, apart from the revoices. If I power off the Tyros, the reload my song, everything has reverted back to piano.... I will try the program above again, thanks for that. meanwhile, is there a way I can do this with only the Tyros 5?

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Are any of the other changes that you're making being saved to the file? Is it just the voice changes which aren't being saved, or is nothing being saved?

One thing I might suggest is to create a simple song recording from scratch on the Tyros and save it, then view the MIDI event list in the MixMaster program I mentioned previously. You should be able to save the event listing to a text file and print it out.

Next, load one of your old MIDI song files, make changes to it, save it, then view the MIDI event list, save it to a text file, and print it.

Compare the two printouts to see if there are any notable differences in the types of messages which are shown at the beginning, where all of the song setup messages are supposed to be. Obviously, there will be differences in the specific messages due to differences in how you set them up. But, for instance, are there certain types of messages in the original Tyros recording which are missing from the edited song file, or vice versa?

 

[Dumpster]

I have the answer, but it's lead to another question. The program that converts my old Amiga Module files into Midi files was placing a control code at the beginning of each midi channel. Using the revoice function on the Tyros was overruling this "live" but the control code remained in the midi file itself. However this brings up a new question.

I can go into the Song Creator, select the midi channel and change the number against the "Prog" line and this changes the instrument, and permanently too! But, unless I am mistaken I do not seem able to find all the lovely Tyros sounds this way. Is there a list of which Tyros sound corresponds to which number, or am I restricted to using the standard midi table? (hope that makes sense, I am still learning.)