Mega Voice in PSR/Tyros styles - Sand, software and sound

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Recently, a member of the PSR Tutorial Forum needed help using a Megavoice in a custom Tyros style. My answer seemed to be useful to a broader audience, so I decided to post my answer here. The information applies to PSR arrangers, too, because the Tyros and PSR share the same SFF1 and SFF2 (SFF GE) style formats.

Megavoice guitars are very different than regular guitar voices.

Regular voices are the usual MIDI voice: 128 velocity levels and only one basic sound. For example, nylon guitar is just the pitched, melodic sound of the notes either louder or softer depending on note velocity.

Megavoice guitars (and other Megavoices) are different. Please look at the Megavoice Map starting on page 16 of the Tyros Data List PDF.

Let’s take a look at the Mega NylonGuitar voice. For MIDI notes B5 and below, the MIDI velocity is broken into eight (8) ranges:

    1- 20 Open soft
   21- 40 Open med
   41- 60 Open hard
   61- 75 Dead
   76- 90 Mute
   91-105 Hammer
  106-120 Slide
  121-127 Harmonics

Each range plays a different kind of sound. So, the MIDI velocity determines which guitar sound. Then, the velocity within that limited range determines how loud it will be.

Example 1: MIDI note A4, velocity 38 makes an Open Med guitar sound which is loud.

Example 2: MIDI note A4, velocity 2 makes an Open Med guitar sound which is quiet.

Example 3: MIDI note A4, velocity 110, makes a Slide guitar sound.

Now, let’s look at the last two columns in the Megavoice map, again, Mega NylonGuitar voice. For MIDI notes between C6 and B7, the Tyros plays a Strum noise. The velocity in this case determines the Strum noise loudness over the full range 1-127.

For MIDI notes above C8, the Tyros plays a Fret noise. The velocity determines the fret noise volume and is full range 1-127.

Example 4: MIDI note D8, velocity 127 plays a very loud fret noise.

The Megavoice mapping makes it more difficult to program (sequence) guitar parts than regular voices. The user needs to make sure that the MIDI note is in the desired range (B5 and under, above C6, etc.) and that the MIDI velocity controls what you want.

Yamaha’s proprietary CASM has a few settings to control Mega Voices. The bad news — you can’t change some of these settings.

When I program Megavoice into a style, I use two parts for each Megavoice:

    Part 1: Pitched notes -- all note B5 and below
            NTR: ROOT TRANS or GUITAR
            NTT: MELODY or CHORD
    Part 2: Noise notes -- all notes above C6
            NTR: ROOT FIXED
            NTT: BYPASS

You want the pitched notes to transpose. You don’t want the noise notes to transpose. (Please think of the noise notes like drum notes/sounds.)

I wrote a three part series of articles about capturing Motif/MOX arpeggios and converting them to PSR/Tyros styles:

If you don’t care about Motif/MOX, then skip part one. Parts two and three are more generally useful and describe the conversion of a MIDI file to a style. Part three concentrates on Megavoice conversion.