Just a few quick Genos™ hits to get the day started.

Thanks for Gerard on the PSR Tutorial Forum and Frank at Audioworks CT, we have the Yamaha Genos Product Guide. This is a slick brochure put out by Yamaha Europe and went out to dealers. A lot of the information is known, but the brochure is more in tune with a professional product launch.

In a small measure of thanks for the product guide, I’d like to slip in a shameless plug for Frank and Audioworks CT. When the Tyros 5 was released, I tested the T5 at the Audioworks store. Eventually, I bought my Yamaha PSR-S950 from Frank. Overall, an excellent customer experience. Frank specializes in arranger workstations and gigs with gear.

We’re still waiting for the Genos Data List PDF. In the meantime, I will update the list of new Genos voices and styles in my earlier post.

Last week, I re-recorded several MIDI backing tracks to WAV audio. Silly me, I had recorded and converted these to MP3 format the first time around. Worse, I deleted the intermediate WAV files in order to save space.

This task gave me a chance to listen critically to the tracks. I quickly got tired of the monotonous TAT-TAT-TAT of the snare drums. Give me Revo drums, please! I definitely foresee Revo drums in the Montage future, too.

After freezing MIDI backing tracks to WAV audio, I play over the audio. Which leads me to a major concern with respect to the assignment of DSP effect units to Genos song parts. Yamaha assigned 16 DSP units to the MIDI song parts, one DSP to each keyboard part, one DSP to the microphone, and one DSP to each style part, etc. for a total of 28 insertion DSP effects.

The 16 DSPs assigned to the MIDI song parts don’t do much for me once I freeze MIDI to audio. So, I’m wondering if those DSP units could be reassigned? Ideally, Yamaha would allocate the DSP units dynamically out of a resource pool. A dynamic assignment (or even a manual reassignment) might free up enough DSP units to implement Seamless Sound Switching (SSS) on Genos.

In SSS, one needs to have reserve DSP units in order to switch to a second voice without a glitch. The Montage SSS scheme effectively forces the voice programmer to reserve adequate DSP resources for the second voice. Seamless Sound Switching is a high demand, user want. I’d love to see Genos SSS in a future update.

Keep playin’ and havin’ fun!