Is the Yamaha MODX Synth Easy to Use?

let's face it sounds in a keyboard are important however something that is often overlooked is how intuitive a keyboard's operating system is if a keyboard is quote unquote hard to use difficult to navigate or just to get your mind around it takes a degree you will most likely have a disappointing experience what good are features if accessing them is so difficult it takes you out of your creative space today we will be looking at some of the basic workflow features of the yamaha modex to determine just how easy or not so easy it is to use when you're actually in the cockpit of this powerful machine hello and welcome to the channel my name is derek if you are new around here it's good to meet you if you are returning to the channel welcome back and today we're going to be talking about the navigation of the modi x is the modi x easy to use so i want to talk about the workflow and so on and so forth with this keyboard i do want to say right off the bat that this is going to be more of a talking video less of a playing video i do have another video up um is the it's a sound comparison between the modi x and the roland fa08 if you want to just kind of hear the modi x [Music] then that video would probably be more suitable for you and of course there are thousands of videos where you were playing the modi x or the yamaha montage same sounds they're playing them and you can hear those sounds but this is an informational video and we're going to be talking about the workflow of this particular keyboard and if you like in-depth videos about keyboards and stuff like that uh definitely consider liking and subscribing to the channel and hitting the bell icon so that you get a notification because i'm always uploading new stuff so let's get into it i do love [Music] i do love this keyboard um most certainly um but when we start talking about keyboards i think now this is purely an opinion i think that sometimes people are focused a little bit too much on just the sounds sounds are very important because ultimately that's what we're trying to produce is we're trying to produce a sound but when you really buy a keyboard and start working with the keyboard one of the things that becomes very important is the way it works in its workflow how easy it is to navigate so on and so forth does have a touch screen does it not have a touch screen do you like a touch screen do you not like a touch screen buttons and all those kinds of things how easy is it to get up and running and get these things going because i tell you something that is completely hard to use and not necessarily hard but something that is not intuitive this keyboard can be um very i don't want to say hard but because the keyboard is so deep it's very complex and there's a lot of different things that you can do but at the same time once you kind of understand the architecture the workflow and so on and so forth you understand that it's intuitive and you're able to use it in even things that are you know complex features are oftentimes easy to employ um but let's talk about the modi x here let's let's go into it so when you open it up when you first turn it on you're going to be in a live set mode and a live set mode is made up of 16 different uh performances and our performance contains all of your sounds and stuff like that so this is a performance you can turn the super knob [Music] right but i can click on another um performance [Music] and so what this mode does is it gives you access to various programs and stuff like that really really quickly and you can you know set up your own live sets i can hit a rhythm track here let's go [Music] so um pretty easy to navigate there so live sets it just gives you 16 different programs or 16 different performances that you have access to right on the fly [Music] so excellent for live playing because you can switch through programs i keep calling them programs but really their performances [Music] you can switch through them very very quickly so um this is your live set mode [Music] but what i wouldn't really get into is the actual performance mode so let's go back to the sound here and hit performance which is basically your home and now this is your performance mode so we can see that this performance is actually made up of two parts uh you have your acoustic piano and you have your fm piano and that's why when you turn the super dab [Music] what's happening is the volume on the acoustic piano is going down and the volume on the fm piano is going up so i can go all the way over and i hear all all you hear is fm i can be somewhere in the middle and you hear a mixture of the two of them or it can be all the way to the left and now all you're hearing is the is the acoustic piano go into category search here and this gives me this pulls up all of my various uh performances which they're called that's what it's called and i can click on various um different menus and so i can do like a category search like i did hit category here at category search and i can come here and select this one see what it sounds like i can click on the concert grand [Music] it's all organized so i can do a program i can do my programs here and let's see go to keyboard now i have electric pianos uh you got your organs guitars so on and so forth [Music] so yeah various various different categories that you can uh pull up now if i wanted to just search for something i can hit this search icon here and i can type in let's see uh acoustic and hit done and everything with the word acoustic and it is going to come up whether it be my pianos keyboards organs guitars bass whatever i want to do if the word acoustic will show up if it shows up in any of the sounds it will it will show up here so anyway that's something else we can do [Music] in order to navigate now something i do want to show you that is kind of important especially when it comes to layering sounds and whatnot is let's go back to my category search and um well i'm gonna go to live set and we're just gonna pick this one hit enter and okay perfect so the modi x has different attributes that you can look at so i just clicked on the one that says attribute here clicks on the touch screen and uh i'm not going to go over all of these the modi x does have two sound engines has the awm two sound engine engine and it has the fmx sound engine so it has two sound engines the fmx engine is sound engine is an fm sound engine and the awm 2 sound engine is a sample based sound engine so i can actually click on awm 2 and now in my search here everything oops everything that's going to come up is going to be out of the awm 2 sound engine if i go into attributes and i click on the fmx right now everything that comes up in my search is going to be based out of the um it's going to be based out of the fmx sound engine and they are separate so in the uh fm sound engine you get uh 64 voice polyphony and in the awm 2 sound engine you get 128 voice polyphony um now if you have a montage you get 128 and 128 in in both of them so anyway there are separate sound engines [Music] so if you're looking to preserve polyphony sometimes if you're layering sounds together try picking something that's fm and something that is awm 2 and that's going to you know not put so much strain on either one of these sound engines and you won't get uh voice cutouts and so on and so forth but this is what i wanted to show you in the attributes now you have the ability to pick single part sounds or multi-part sounds so um or multi-part performances so this is a single i'm in the category of single part now everything that comes up now is a single part performance so if i hit enter right i can see that there's only one sound here i have one through eight channels or one through eight uh parts that i can use and this only takes up one part that's what makes it a single part performance okay now if i go back into my category search i can go here to my category search and go to my attributes and i can go to multi and now all of a sudden everything i click on is going to be a multi-part a multi-part performance of some sort so let's go here let's go back into my category search for regular category search and i'm going to click on this [Music] now let's do this one [Music] perfect i hit enter and now i can see that i have two different parts i have a piano part on number one and i have a pad part on number two because this is a multi-part performance so let's go back to here let's go back to my category search now i'm going to change this to all now the modi x has it color coded so any part that you see any performance that you see um that's in the color blue is going to be a multi-part performance anything that's in the color green is going to be a single part performance so you can tell at a glance you can use my jog wheel or i can use these buttons here to navigate the menus you can tell at a glance you can sell hey this one is green that means it's a single part performance if i hit enter it's only going to be one part um go back to my category search and if i click on something that's going to be a blue one let's do the bridge hit enter this is actually made up of three different parts to make this one performance okay so a mistake that a lot of people i don't know if you necessarily can call it a mistake but uh one of the things that a lot of people do is they will pick something like [Music] the cfx concert grand which is also a multi-part performance [Music] i know it only sounds like one sound but in order to make this grand piano [Music] it takes a multiplicity of parts so this takes four parts [Music] so what people do oftentimes when they want to layer sounds they have something like this that takes the four parts and then i'm gonna pick another sound that takes them four parts and then they're wondering why hey how come i can't really lay a bunch of layer a bunch of sounds and stuff together or how come i'm getting a bunch of voice dropouts and stuff like that as far as my polyphony uh well that's because that's because when you are looking through your categories here you are looking at performances you are not looking at um parts necessarily now these the green ones are single part but the blue ones are multi-part and there are some multi-part performances that will take up all eight of your channels that you have to use like this one here specifically use this channels one through six [Music] so [Music] so when i am actually building layers or building uh i'm going to build some layers of my own just a quick tip i am typically using single parts because the single parts are uh better for layering and stuff like that because you um you just have more more at your disposal a lot of these sounds that are multi-part sounds they're made to play by themselves not necessarily made to do a whole bunch of complex layering and stuff like that now i still do have you know two available parts left in this performance that i can add some other sounds and so on and so forth [Music] all right so let's go back into my category search here i'm going to go into my attributes and i'm going to click on single so i can pull up all my single part performances hit enter and i'm going to choose the cfx pop studio brand i'm gonna hit enter and now that's just a single part performance so it's just one and i have two through eight that i can also add if i want to do a layer simply click here hit the add or hit the uh hit this plus button here because all these are empty so i can hit this on the touchscreen and now i can bring up my own another sound here so i'm going to use a let's say [Music] add that so now my part um now my performance my cfx pop studio grand i can always change the name has two different parts in it the first part is going to be the piano part and the second part is going to be that pad that i just chose and i can adjust the volume using my sliders over here [Music] do [Music] if i wanted to add another part uh to the layer and let's say i want to do a string i should just hit the plus and go to my other strings here balance strings hit enter and now i've got strings and the strings are on part number three and i can adjust the volume using the slider [Music] got my pad here and my piano [Music] so uh that's how you do layers in this keyboard so i can come over here and let's just hit delete select it yes i do want to delete it select the pad delete it hit delete yes i do want to delete it now i'm back to my single part performance [Music] so let's do a split now so a split is basically a layer that you select you select your different um keyboard your key limits so i'm going to hit the plus here and we're going to choose a base i'm going to go into my category and choose base uh subcategory i'm going to choose electric base now remember all of my attributes are set to single so everything that's coming up is going to be in green these are all single part performances so i don't have to worry about the base being made up of multiple parts uh let's choose this one and then hit enter now i have a base now of course i don't want the base over top of the entire keyboard [Music] so what i'm going to do is with the base part selected click it and then i'm going to hit edit over here and when that it comes up now i can set my note limit so i'm going to be adjusting the bottom note so i'm going to come over here to don't limit and hit where the bottom note is and click on keyboard so all i have to do is hit the key that i want to be the bottom note oh i'm doing the bass i'm going to do the top note so i'm going to do this one here it's keyboard and we're going to set that to this now it's set to c3 um enter exit go back to my performance and now base is on the bottom nobody come up top no more bass [Music] now of course i could do the same thing here with the keyboard um with the piano rather hit edit i just selected it hit edit and i'm going to adjust the bottom note for this one so we're going to come over here i'm going to hit keyboard so all i have to do is hit the key hit enter and i come back out to my performance [Music] now it's just the base on the bottom [Music] so now i have my base on the bottom and my [Music] piano on the top so that's nice all you have to do is click here and hit edit and that's where you find those uh that's where you find those parameters now i'm actually on my base part here now if i don't want the base to be able to play two notes at once i can also adjust that so i click on my bass part i'm going to hit edit and in my general parameters here i can come over here where it says mono or poly i can change it to mono [Music] and now only one note [Music] will play at a time [Music] [Applause] so now only one note will play at a time in this because i adjusted it here if i change it to here like this to poly now you can play more than one note at a time so uh that's just so that's how you set up your layers and that's how you set up your splits all right perfect so let's get out of here let's go back into my performance i'll go to live set no category search and uh yeah pick this one maybe [Music] perfect so now i have a single part performance now if i wanted to add a a rhythm pattern to this i can just hit this rhythm pattern button select the drum kit that i want and here we are all to races [Music] right so now i've got my rhythm pattern but i can uh select um let's see the tempo over here take the tempo up or down let's go [Music] so i can turn the volume up or down [Music] all right and i can select you know the actual pattern itself but before i do that uh just want to show you that you can select different patterns so i just uh you got eight different patterns here that are already set up so first one is my number one um [Music] it's a different pattern [Music] number three [Music] all right so you got various patterns and stuff there now i can actually adjust these patterns and whatnot so let's just hit enter and let's go ahead and get out of here and select this one and i'm going to hit edit and the drum track is actually in the arpeggiator so i'm going to come down here and hit arpeggio and then i select individual and now i can change parts 1 through 8 to whatever i want to so right now the drum pattern is set to this for number two [Music] but i can come over here and select it and hit category search and now i can change it to say this one [Music] and hit enter and now my number one is this one and my number two is this one [Music] now in order to navigate these various patterns i don't really like using the touchscreen um it's fine when you're just kind of editing and figuring some things out but for performance that's when i like to use my actual scenes i've got scenes one through eight right here um i got four knobs one two four buttons one two three four if i toggle this now i'm through five six seven and eight so um you actually have eight scenes and these eight scenes can literally correspond with these eight different patterns so what i'm going to do is select number one i'm going to turn on my drum pattern [Music] now i'm going to store this as a scene so i hit shift and i hit store and now this is scene number one it's that simple a scene basically takes a snapshot of everything in your keyboard as it is right now and sets up those parameters and then all you have to do is click on and click on the scene and it will restore everything back to what your keyboard was like at that particular time when you stored the scene so i'm going to select number two now here this pattern right so i like that one i'm going to hit shift and store under number two now it says scene stored so now if i hit scene number one number two [Music] so uh that's nice uh you can just hit the scene and boom your [Music] and you don't just have to use that for drum patterns but you can recall any kind of parameters that you have set up in your keyboard you can just recall them just by hitting those scene buttons so that's pretty convenient uh maybe you notice me hitting this octave button here um [Music] the octave button is right there so i can go down or i can go up and adjust it and for those of you who uh use the transpose you simply hit shift and now hit shift and hold it down hit shift hold it down hit shift hold it down if i hit shift and hold both of them it goes back to zero so you have your transpose and your octave buttons [Music] right there so i know a lot of people talk about people using the transpose um like hey learn to play your instrument don't use the transpose but never and i guess there's a lot of truth to that um [Music] but if professionals weren't using the transpose it wouldn't be on all the professional keyboards so i'm just saying a lot of professionals are definitely using transpose comes in handy certain times but anyway to each their own let's um let's keep moving on here so let me go back into my category search and i'm just going to pick a another sound a single part performance now if i want to adjust the um actual effects on this i can just click on the instrument that i want hit edit and come down here to the menu where it says effects and i'm going to go to right now i'm in routing and i can go to a or b so each part and a performance in the modi x you have two insert effects that you can employ so my first insert effect right now is set to a damper resonance but if i want to i could to actually change that uh let's see i can change it to let's go to reverb uh let's go to hall reverb we'll say okay i'm going to increase the time of the reverb here [Music] and so i can adjust the various parameters [Music] of the reverb or i could pick a different effect all together let's pick something that we don't pin on a piano hey flanger perfect hit enter and there's just a whole lot of effects that you can uh navigate so my second insert effect my b insert b is another insert effect and right now it's on an eq but i can pick anything here so you got your flangers you got reverb delay cores flanger phase distortion compression let's use a multi-brand compressor and just that so this is where your effects are you can add two different insert effects to your specific to your specific parts but also you can add effects to your actual the entire performance and the way you do that is rather than being selected on a part and hitting edit like this to to select your you know effects and your eq and stuff per part you can come up here click up here and hit edits so now you're not on a part but now you're on the entire performance now where that really comes in handy is if it goes here excuse me to my category search uh and we're going to rather than doing singles we're going to do all hit enter and i'm going to pick something that has multiple parts hit enter uh hit view because i changed my view by accident so let's just talk about that really quickly since i changed the view by accident if you hit this view button uh it actually shows you um all of your [Music] all the channels that you have access to you actually do have 9 through 12 and 13 through 16 as well but they can't be played from the keyboard they would have to be triggered by some sort of external source or trigger just kind of via midi but you couldn't play them actually play them from the from the key bed so you do have 16 different parts in every single performance but only eight of them can be played from the key bed and you can see those different parts here and assign different parts by using uh by using these over here so i could select here and it's like i could select something and i could put something in parts number 16 if i wanted to but i wouldn't be able to play it from the keyboard i can only play parts one through eight from the key bed all right let's go back to my regular classic view here [Music] so this particular performance has six different parts to make up this [Music] it has a cfx grand piano which takes up four parts and then it has two different fm pads [Music] and that's where we're getting this part from the sound all right so if i wanted to uh you know um edit a particular edit the effects right and i wanted to edit the effects of the entire thing that's where i have to be actually clicked on uh actually i have to actually select this up here and then hit edit and now [Music] i'm actually looking at you know the master effects and the reverb sends [Music] reverb send parameters so and um and the master eq because it's going to go over the entire performance if i come in here and just hit this here and then hit edit when i choose a particular um let's say i'm going to come in here right now it's on a compressor but i let's say i'm going to change this to a flanger [Music] hit enter right so the flanger is only affecting this one part i can hit solo it's only affecting that one part if i come over here and hit the pad there's no flange on the pad because it's just an insert effect that affects this one part if i want something that's going to affect the total performance that's when you click up here and you hit edit so that's uh basically how you do your your effects and tons of different effects that you can choose but if you're you know just talking about the basic navigation of it it's very easy just to choose effects uh really quickly and and you're off to the races um now let's go really quickly let's go back to my live sets gonna click here this is for for live playing basically so you can pull up your various performances really really quickly and you can set up your own so right now i'm in the preset uh menu and uh by clicking this down arrow you can navigate to the various live sets that they already have set up in the in the modi x you know so i want to choose motion control so the name of this live set is called motion controls everything underneath this live set is going to have some sort of motion control parameters on it [Music] pretty cool but you can set up your own as well so i can go to user too now i have this live set let's get rid of this real quick just kind of ringing out all right let's go to address the piano here [Music] so we're going to take this piano and i'm going to hit enter right and then i can assign let's see we're going to assign a pad but i'm going to do a single part pad so i'm going to go to single show me my single parts and i'm going to go to my pads here and we're going to choose that's good hit enter now i got all right so now we got that we got this two part now let's say i would actually wanted to store this all i have to do is hit store this is what i didn't do last time and i'm going to save it as a new performance right and i can name it whatever i want to i'm going to call this piano just piano bell pad so i'm going to save it for performance hit done and now it's saved now it's saved now i can go into my live set here and now i can hit edit and i can add it i can change the color and let's say i want to do blue and then hit done and so now i have this perform this live performance and i have this [Music] and you can do 16 of them so you can literally when i'm playing live i can have 16 songs ready to go um or 16 parts of songs or however i want it uh right on uh one screen so it's like the kind of like a setless mode in the core chronos um i can come in here let's say do edit i can hit delete delete and now they're gone so it's as simple as that if i want to add something here it is you can set it's a volume right here [Music] if i wanted to copy it i can say copy and then when i hit the next one now it's copied into the next next slot so i can copy performances and stuff like that and then just hit done and now i've got these two but of course they're exactly the same if i want to switch go to my category search all right perfect so that those are your live basically how you set up your live set so um i hope this video was helpful i just wanted to show you that the modi x is actually fairly easy to navigate um and fairly easy to get up and running now of course there are a lot of deeper parameters and stuff that you can get into but as far as just picking sounds setting up layers splits having a rhythm pattern saving your scenes adjusting the effects and doing live sets which is actually a lot of functionality you can do a lot with just what i showed you and just what i just what i um demonstrated today the modi x is actually very it's actually pretty easy to navigate once you get into it of course it's a lot of menu diving you can't have an opera function on something like this because there's just so many functions the knobs on the keyboard would be endless it is a it is a performance synthesis you know it's really designed around you know sound designing and having a lot of sounds and doing things like that so i just wanted to show you yes the modi x does have a nice in my opinion [Music] it has a really nice workflow it's laid out very nice i can get the sounds and stuff that i want i'm looking for something specifically i have these categories and stuff here i have the live sets and stuff that i can go to and just click on uh what i want for you know live performances i can go into this mode if i want to layer something just add you know something really really easily like that and hit enter and [Music] and i've got a layer do another one add something else we're going to do here marimba enter i mean that's literally how easy it is and then i've got my and i've got my controllers my sliders over here to control the volumes so an actual practice is actually very fast you know pick something else hit enter [Music] now i've got four anyway that is it uh thank you for taking sticking with me this long and watching this video please consider liking and subscribing if you if you're liking the content and uh thank you so much for watching once again and you guys have a wonderful day i will see you on the next video

Channel: Darrick Keels

Views: 46,463

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Id: Fej_Nf4-5MQ

Length: 43min 41sec (2621 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020