Sunday, January 18, 2009
Welcome
In an effort to curb my appetite for new instruments, I recently bought a Yamaha WX5 wind controller and VL70-m tone generator. The WX5 looks like an electronic clarinet and the VL70-m allows it to sound like just about any instrument you can think of! The great part for me is that they are both small, light, and the WX5 is extremely easy to play. The challenge has been learning how to tweak the VL70-m to make it sound exactly how I want...
The VL70-m was first introduced by Yamaha in 1996. As far as I know, the ones you can buy today have not really changed since 1996. Probably the main change is Yamaha's lack of support for this product! The manual still lists "“http://www.yamaha.co.jp./english/xg/html/libhm.html" as the place to go for voice editing software, although the website has been long abandoned. And since VL70-m was issued before USB really took off and before things like Windows XP and Vista, a little support would be a very helpful thing!
I have been scouring the Internet to get help, and what I am finding is that there are quite a few people who picked up where Yamaha left off supporting this product, but not a good index to pull all of the references together in one place. My intent is to create that reference here.
This site is starting off as a blog to make it easy for me to publish, but eventually I hope someone will offer to host this somewhere. Feel free to add comments to any post. If you found any value, I would appreciate a comment. You do not need an ID, password, or e-mail address to leave comments.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Yamaha FAQs
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It's a compact rackmount stereo monophonic synthesizer, which uses Yamaha's SVA Physical Modeling Synthesis. It supports single voice monophonic operation, much like the Yamaha VL7.
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The panels are as follows:
Front panel:
• WX-in
• Breath jack (for BC1,2, or 3 breath controller)
• 1/8" mini-phone jack for headphones
• Power/Vol
• Yellow-reen backlit display
• Six lit buttons:
• play, edit, util, effect, mode, breath
• Nine unlit buttons:
• midi/wx, part-, part+, enter, select-, select+, exit, value-, value+
Back panel:
• Audio outs 1/4" l/mono, r
• DC input ( power supply provided)
• 'To Host' adapter (mini-DIN 8-pin suitable for Mac, also usable with '8-pin mini DIN --> 9-pin D-SUB cross cable'; which goes to RS-232C port on IBM PC's and compatibles)
• Host select 4-position switch:
• Mac, PC-1, PC-2, MIDI (PC1 is for Japanese NEC PC-9801/9821 series computers, used widely in Japan; PC2 is for IBM PC/AT machines)
• MIDI IN, OUT, and THRU
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It includes 256 preset sounds in two ROM banks:
• PR1: 128 synth sounds, suitable for use with keyboards (although there are very nice breath-controlled patches in there as well).
• PR2: 128 'acoustic' sounding patches - more acoustic-type instrument emulations.
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There are two banks for storing edited sounds:
• INT: 64 variations taken from the two preset banks described above - You can change the eq, effects, controller settings, etc. that were originally supplied with the preset sound (for instance if a certain patch had too much delay for your tastes, you could save a 'dry' version in the INT bank) - this is for editing from the front panel (see FAQ on this below).
• CST: Six completely custom sounds - you need the Mac-based Expert Editor or the Visual Editor (Mac or Windows) to send the sounds to the VL70-m via the MIDI port or serial port.
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No - unfortunately the Expert and Analogue editors are only available for the Mac.
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The VL1-m has all parameters available at all times. The VL70-m has certain combinations of parameters available, with some mutually exclusive parameter options (you can't have a patch that uses both 'throat formant' and 'resonator').
The VL1-m used a 32 bit effects processor for it's output DSP, whereas the VL70-m uses a 24bit effects processor similar to those use on the MU series of modules. The sampling resolution on the VL1-m was at 48Khz, whereas on the VL70-m the sampling resolution is at 44.1Khz.
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As mentioned in the last Q&A the VL1 and the VL7 both have 32-bit effects, and the VL70-m has 24 Bit effects using a similar chip to that found on the Yamaha MU series of tone modules.
There are many more effects *options* on the VL70-m than on the VL1-m, including:
• Reverbs: none, hall1, hall2, room1, room2, room3, stage1, stage2, plate, white room, tunnel, canyon, basement.
• Choruses: none, chorus1, chorus2, chorus3, celeste1, celeste2,celeste3, flanger1, flanger2, symphonic, phaser.
• Variations: (some of the above) plus delay lcr, delay lr, echo, cross delay, er1, er2 (early reflections), gate, reverse gate, karaoke1, 2, and 3, rotary speaker, tremolo, auto pan, distortion, overdrive, amp simulator, 3-band eq (mono), 2-band eq (stereo), auto wah (LFO), pitch change, Aural Exciter (R), touch wah, touch wah + dist, compressor, noise gate, and thru.
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Controllers [assignments, sensitivity, levels], filter - amplitude - embouchure - pitch envelope generator, vibrato, detune & voice level, velocity sensitivity, note limits, portamento, dry level, voice name, reverb - chorus - variation - distortion parameters and breath settings.
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Resonator, 5-band parametric EQ, and the main instrument parameters (the actual physical model itself)
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95 of the 119 MIDI continuous control messages can be routed to your choice of: pressure, embouchure, tonguing, amplitude, scream, breath noise, growl, throat formant, filter, harmonic enhancer, damping, and absorption. (These are familiar to VL1 owners.) Here's a list of the MIDI CC number assignments:
| Control no. | Assignment |
| off(00) | off (used by Bank Select MSB) |
| 01 | mod wheel |
| 02 | breath controller |
| 04 | foot controller |
| 05 | portamento time |
| 06 | Data Entry MSB |
| 07 | volume |
| 10 | pan |
| 11 | expression |
| 32 | (off)off (used by Bank Select LSB) |
| 38 | Data Entry LSB |
| 64 | Hold1 |
| 65 | portamento switch |
| 67 | soft pedal |
| 71 | harmonic content |
| 72 | release time |
| 73 | attack time |
| 74 | brightness |
| 91 | fx send level (reverb) |
| 93 | fx send level 3 (chorus) |
| 94 | fx send level 4 (variation effect) |
| AT | aftertouch |
| VEL | velocity |
| PB | pitchbend |
Numbers not assigned above can be routed to your choice of the 14 controller parameters. I haven't thrown all that much MIDI data at the thing yet so I don't know how much it can handle. It does pretty good with breath/pitchbend though.
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It is essentially the same sound quality! The biggest difference is with the effects. The VL70-m's are 24bit as opposed to the 32bit DSP found on the VL1/1m and VL7. It is still very quiet though, suitable for recording.
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Either from the front panel, or by Sysex dump from your sequencer, or by using one of the available editing packages from this web site.
There is an option to send voices from the current bank that's open in the VL70-m Expert Editor to any of 6 user locations (CST001-006) in the VL70-m itself.
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As the VL70M is using the same 'Interpolate Speed' parameter that the VL1 uses, you may find that you would like to set this parameter a little higher (above about 2msec), this will improve the response to fast modulations on breath signals.
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Indeed, The Flute works great on it, as does TrumpBone. Not to mention all the classic VL sounds. If you play wind synth... you'll really appreciate the VL70-m.
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All forms of acoustic instrument can be emulated on the VL70-m to varying degrees,
it is just up to the skill and prowess of the user to make it sound how he or she would like it to.
Pasted from http://www.yamahasynth.com/support/faq/vl70m.html
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