Yamaha MODX - Tutorial with Blake Angelos

[Music] hi this is Blake Angelo's from Yamaha here with my friends at Kraft music to show you the Modi ex music synthesizer from Yamaha [Music] the mo DX music synthesizer comes from the same DNA as the montage music synthesizer our flagship instrument in fact the sounds of the montage music synthesizer will load right into mo DX but the great thing about mo DX is that it is extremely mobile very lightweight I'll take you through some of the sounds the great control and we'll talk about the mobility as we move forward in this video mo DX has two primary sound engines the awm 2 sample-based engine and the FM x FM synthesis engine the awm 2 engine is 128 voice stereo polyphony and has the exact same content as the montage music synthesizer the FMX engine has 88 algorithms 8 operator and that 64 voice polyphony between the two of them is the dynamic control interface called motion control [Music] the most recognizable component of the motion control system is the super novel the super knob is a macro controller that controls multiple parameters simultaneously as we go through this video I'll show you how you can use the super knob in creative in really musical ways the super tops pretty cool it can give you some visual feedback about what's going on it can actually pulse in time with the tempo I can do a few things I can turn off the animation I can turn off the knob flash or I can take it all the way off and I'm gonna do that for the rest of this video I'll take you through some of the controls on the front panel of the mo DX but the first thing I want to point out is the seven-inch touchscreen this touchscreen is the same size in fact it is the same touchscreen as the montage it makes navigating and finding things a breeze so with mo DX we had our three points sound control let's talk a little bit about mobility this is the mo dx8 the 88 note graded hammer version for the pianist somebody that needs to have the the weighted action because they grew up playing piano and they're used to playing piano but they still want to have something that's very lightweight this instrument here the mo dx8 is only thirty pounds and literally I can pick it up with one finger it's not a problem it's very very lightweight now the mo dx7 which I don't have here is seventy-six notes it is syntaxin it weighs 16 pounds even lighter super light we like that for the keyboardist because the keyboardist wants to have you know something a little bit bigger than 61 notes but isn't ready to go to 88 notes they just need something seventy six notes synth action for playing clavinets electric piano and so on and then finally the mode ex6 is 61 notes we think of that for the synthesis the thing I like about the mode ex6 first of all it's only 14 pounds but as these the size of this gets a little smaller everything's very close and very easy to get to so for someone that runs a euro rack system or has some analog synthesizers having close controls right in front of you to tweak things and to add cool FM sounds to your analog system it's right there and that little mo DX 661 know it's synth action the last point I want to make about mobility are the signature bags that we have for the Modi x-series we have a six seven and eight bag the eight bag actually has these really cool rollerblade style wheels on it that make it really easy to roll it around and at 30 pounds super easy but the ones I really dig are the 6 and the 7 I personally have a Modi x7 and I'm gonna use that on a gig finally we've announced it so I can play it on a gig and I actually have a gig coming up where I have to walk a long ways to get to where we're gonna set up and to have something that weighs 16 pounds in a backpack style gig bag with my pedals and my cables in the fairly ample pouch in there is awesome so it's a great thing about kraft music too is that in a bundle you can get that bag the fc7 pedal any of the sustained ketil's cables and whatever just check out the bundles they have lots of them on there that you can choose from to get exactly what's right for you [Music] [Music] let's go over the user interface I'll show you what I like to call the four buttons that you need to know when you first approach Modi X the first one is the performance home button so just like montage performance is the only mode in the instrument it's where all the music happens and there's a dedicated button that's called performance home right here now if you look in the screen there's this thing that I like to call convenient redundancy and what that is is there are ways to get to the performance home in the screen or with the dedicated button so if I happen to be in a place like utility and I want to get back home I can either touch the dedicated button and go right back to performance or if I'm in utility and I just touch the home icon it does the same thing convenient redundancy so that's performance home and we'll dig into that a little bit deeper later on the next button I'll show you is the live set the live set is a collection of up to 16 performances this live set Bank is a preset bank and there are pages under each of these I can get to by just touching under on the page icon here and I can go through different categories spiralizer and synth motion sent and so on this is preset if I touch here or if I touch the live set button I can toggle through all the other live sets that are installed in here in this case this is the boss indoor fur library this is Richard Devine performances this is the montage expanded collection and so on and these are my user live sets you can create your own live sets you can edit them if I decide I want to move maybe this sound and change I can just touch swap boom and it swaps things I'll swap it back so you have control over setting up your own live sets as well in the user live set area category search and MODY X is really slick it allows me to search by text by attribute or by bank so I'll go over to the bank and favorite you can see if I just want to search for example only sounds in the Bose indoor fair library I can touch there or if I want to just look for anything that I've said as a favorite or a user sound or preset and so on the next box over is attribute what attribute allows me to do is search different criteria so let's say I just want to see only FMX performances that's all I'm viewing now so if I want to dial in and find what brass sounds are only generated by an FF MX I can do that by touching attribute f MX and touching brass now next to the attribute is the magnifying glass the magnifying glass allows me to search by name so let's say I know that there's a sound called ambient but I can't remember anything else I know that that word is in there if I just type in a M B I and T anything with the word ambient will show up and sure enough there is my ambient sound that I was looking for so that's performance live set category search the fourth button is audition what audition does is it plays a demonstration sequence but it not only just plays a sequence it animates the keyboard and it shows you what's happening with the performance a lot of times it's difficult to know exactly what's happening the audition Clues you into that so for example let's say I want to grab a guitar sound and I'll grab an electric clean one and there's one that I'd like to show this with that's called eight amps in a TC if I touch the performance home button I see this view where there's all the parts loaded up here each one is muted what does it do if I play it I realize it's a guitar sound but what exactly is going on with eight amps in a TC the audition will let you know [Music] now I stopped the audition before it's over it obviously it's playing through each of the parts and each one is a different amplifier type why did I stop it well because when I find something I like as soon as I press the audition button it stops exactly in that in that position with the sound that I want and I can immediately start playing it now if you know the montage you realize that the mo DX has less controls on the front panel there's all these buttons are not on mo DX this is a nice little area to put like a laptop or a tablet or whatever um we also don't have as many faders there's four faders and four knobs you still have control and you can still get to all eight of the parts by touching the one through four or five through eight but what you don't get is some of the cool highlights the details like the the LEDs around the knobs and so on the flagship you get all that stuff we also have some very unique Moe DX control on here as well and one of those unique controls is the part select mute solo button now as I said before all those buttons over here you can do that with physical buttons on a montage but on mo DX since there's not those buttons here we have this shortcut what it happens is when I touch the part select mute solo it brings up a dialog in the touchscreen itself where I can see things like mute solo and select it functions like those buttons just in the touchscreen so if I want to unmute things I touch the mute and I just touch the parts I want to unmute or if I want to solo something I touch solo and I can solo parts and if I want to select a part for editing say part two I can hit the select and I can select it just like that and drop in the edit mode so that's the part select mute solo button [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so let's move over to the left side of the keyboard over here you have essentially the same controls as you have an on house just in a different location so you have pitchman mod wheels the assignable buttons that unlock different things of the performance you have motion sequence on motion sequence trigger ARP octave and transpose to transpose the keyboard you touch the shift button and it says right here and you can see on the front panel that things that are shift functions appear in a black kind of a line so if I touch shift I can transpose the keyboard without touching shift its octave shifts on the mo DX we have kind of a cool area right here this is where the master volume knob is so that just turns up and down the keyboard but the thing I love about mo DX is the a 2d input a to the input has a gain control and there's a stereo a 2d so you can plug in a guitar or another keyboard or a vocal mic directly into the a 2d input and process it through the effects it can also be used when you record to a DA W because this is an audio interface as well speaking of audio interface you have a dedicated USB volume knob this is very cool what this allows me to do is it allows me to control the playback from a DA W so I'm literally controlling the volume input from USB the other cool thing is that let's say I want to use this on a gig since mo DX is an audio and MIDI interface one cable connects to the computer and I can monitor virtual instruments or tracks that I'm playing to with this handy physical knob right here the USB volume knob very cool now as I said before there are eight knobs and eight faders on a montage there's four here so how do I get to all the different parts you have selections right here for different parts one through four five through eight one through four five through eight part or if I'm selecting an individual part and I want to edit at the level below that where the operators and the elements of a part are I can select this to toggle those and I have operator or element 1 through 4 or 5 through 8 so you can still get to everything there's just toggle switches to get to them another thing is the backlit button right here touching this allows me to toggle through the different levels here so at the top level tone control cutoff frequency resident of the filter pan portamento attack decay release and reverb send EQ and arpeggio motion sequence control right here so I can toggle between that and then the very bottom one is the assignable the assignable which are controlled by the super knob or can be controlled are almost like mini super knobs each one of them can also have macro controls and I can assign them to control various aspects of parts of a performance pretty cool [Music] now in the middle section here you have a very similar set up as montage you have your super knob knob position these are all identical pretty much same here too with the transport control control assign like montage allows me to assign things that I'll show that a little bit but a new button on Modi X is a very cool one that is just called rhythm pattern rhythm pattern allows me to instantly add a drum groove to a performance for various things that I want to do so in this case for example I have the rhythm pattern I have just a piano here let's say I just want to play along with a drum groove I'm practicing and I just want to shed over a drum groove rhythm pattern is great for that so the first thing I want to do is I touch the rhythm pattern button and it drops me in to a basically a category search area that gives me different drum kits if I select a drum kits a jazz sticks it immediately brings in the jazz kick along with any arpeggios or drum grooves that go with it let's say I want to play to a cool jazz drum groove that's about this fast if I touch the shift button and touch tempo it'll bring me to the tap tempo and I can tap that right in so if I'm thinking 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 cool I got it now I'll go back one level and I'm right back to my rhythm pattern and as soon as I start playing the rhythm pattern will start in play with me so check it out [Music] so that's one way to use the rhythm pattern button is just for practice just to add drum groove to something to play along to but there's another way you can use rhythm pattern as well what this allows you to do is to do further production so I'll start with in our Peggy ated performance and I'll add a cool drum groove to it and I'll show you something else that is happening with that rhythm pattern button as well so for the next example I'm gonna go to the second page of my live set and grab this sound in the all FMX everything in here is FM X this one FM chilla they love this is just a great sounding very inspirational FM sound [Music] it sounds cool because it keeps moving but I need to add a drum groove to it so touch rhythm pattern there is my selection here I'll touch trap kit and let's hear what trap kit sounds like with this [Music] [Music] so many of the preset performances in Modi acts are fully baked and people want to learn how to edit this instrument how to assign things to super knobs and a lot of times they start with these fully baked performances that have already been assigned and it's not very easy to understand what's going on when you have something that's already assigned so I'll show you kind of how I approach getting your head around how this whole performance in parts to do some basic things like splits and layers and stuff like that so the first thing I'm going to show you is I'm going to touch this in my my my user Bank I have the full concert grand piano from the motif XF so it appears that was a voice in the motif XF and it appears as a single part performance and sure enough this is full contra Grande [Music] so that's full concert grand now what I want to do is just add a simple pad sound a layer sound so how do I do that I just select a part that's open so right across here I have eight parts that are available so I'll select a new part now I want to add a different part here but I want to make sure it's a single part instead of a big multi part how do I do that that's where that attribute in the category search becomes handy I just search for single part performances and then I'm gonna go over here to the strings category maybe and I'll go to maybe the synth strings category and I'll select something like VP soft this is a cool pad sound so I have it selected I press enter and sure enough I'll have a pad sound now [Music] so that pad sounds pretty loud what I want to do is I want to assign the pad sound to the super knob how do I do that well one thing I can do I already have that second part selected so it's important to know that when I press edit with a part selected it drops me into part edit let me show you the difference between understanding what levels you're editing on I'll go to the top level and I select that it brings up a category search over here but I'm just going to touch edit and you'll see at the top of the screen that I'm at the top of the performance because I selected the top of the performance now in order to edit a part which is what I want to do which is that the pad sound I'm going to touch that part select button that allows me to instantly select the part I want to edit which in this case is part two and you'll see up in that upper left hand corner how that dialogue changes from edit common audio to edit part two common so now I'm at this level what I want to do is I'm gonna select the part setting over here that dialogue box drops away and it drops into the part area and here's the volume control for the pad part I'm gonna turn that all the way down because I don't want any of the pad sound so sure enough I'll play it so you hear that it's just be I don't know [Music] so I'm gonna touch control a sign so it's important to understand that any parameter that you have in the screen that is controllable by any of the controllers that could be the mod wheel of the super knob and so on the control assign button will illuminate and I touch it and it's asking me to move one of these controllers to assign that parameter I'm going to assign that to the volume control and sure enough now [Music] so you can see that I've assigned the super knob to control the pad volume now in this performance the foot controller is not assigned to the super knob a lot of people don't understand that the super knob control with the foot control pedal is something that's assigned at individual part levels sometimes I may want to release that sometimes I want to assign that well let's make sure that the super knob can be controlled by the FC seven how do I do that I'm going to touch again the partselect and I'm gonna touch common so I'm looking at the entire performance here I'll shut that area down here I'm gonna go over here to where it says control and control number this is under edit common audio it's the top of the performance I'm gonna touch control number so under control number it gives me the actual MIDI controller numbers that are assigned to various parameters I'm going to touch foot control to right now it's assigned to controller 4 if I move this all the way to the very top it will say super knob that is how you assign the super knob to foot control or to or I could put it to foot controller one which is set to expression right now or I could put the super knob to maybe the mod wheel if I want to but really what you wanted is that foot controller and sure enough if I move it now the foot controller will now control the super knob so now I have full concert grand with a pad sound assigned to the super knob with the foot controller controlling the super knob [Music] so let's say I love the balance here between the pad and the piano and I want to assign that to a button so I can instantly recall it that's what a scene is all about so to assign a scene I touch the ship button and touch a scene if I move this super knob a little bit more here shift scene if I want it all the way to the top shift scene and you'll notice that scene to scene 3 scene 4 it instantly recalls those settings so here's my favorite setting right here [Music] so now what I want to do is I want to add a third part and the third part I want to add is a pretty cool part actually I'm going to touch part three now I'm gonna go to the bank favorite category and if you look down here you see all my banks that I have loaded into the library you can load up to eight library areas into the mo DX and I have about six of them in here and the one I want to choose here is called dx7 ROM one and two so what is that that is the ROM one and two cartridge of the original dx7 so how did I get the dx7 ROM one and two into mo DX well at Yamahas centcom there is a place called FM converter and what FM converter is it's a cloud-based converter that takes these old legacy DX 70 X 8 1 Z T X 8 16 files you literally take those bulk old 80s voice data files drop them onto one icon hit convert and it spits out a montage file and mo DX reads montage file so I can load in things like this dx7 sound so that's what I'm gonna do and I'll select brass 3 so I'm gonna press Enter now I have my parts select mute solo well in this case I really want to solo this part so I touched that solo comes up I'm now exactly how it comes in from the dx7 there's no reverb there were no effects on the dx7 so I can add those things but what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some cool super knob things to this part here and and we'll blend it in with the piano and the and the pad that we created before so since I have this part selected when I press edit it's gonna drop me in to part edit so I know that edit edit part 3 common now what I want to do is I'm going to look at the part settings which is over here you can see the listing over here and here are the algorithms you know just changing the algorithm or the arrangement of operators can greatly change how a how a FM sound sounds I want to select algorithm 30 year algorithm being the arrangement of operators so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to select one of the operators here operator 8 now the dx7 only had sine waves but Modi X gives you the ability to grab the different spectral components so I'm gonna select one like a resonant spectral component you can hear what happens when I change that it actually increases the resonance at this frequency I can adjust the skirt which is sort of the the the cue point how much frequency is being affected so gets a little brighter as I move that so I'll put the skirt here and maybe then so I want to assign this parameter resonance to the super knob since the control assign light is illuminated that means touching that allows me to assign it that fast to the super knob so now I have now I want the curve to be a little different here so I'll select a different curve type you have all these ones in here and I can create my own user curve for how the motion of the super knob moves here so I'll select one like I don't know tilt sign let's see what that one does [Music] so I'll move this down here maybe a little bit so that's pretty cool so now I have a cool motion to that the last thing I want to do is I just want to add reverb syn to the super knob as well so I'll touch part settings general and touch reverb send there's no reverb on here but touching control assign allows me to add that and I can change the motion of this if I want to as well to something like I don't know how about a triangle motion so in this case it starts with a little bit of reverb but you can hear in there it'll get add more send and then it'll pull the send down to basically zero and then the very last part of the super knob motion it'll go up in the end it's dry right there and the reverb comes up I mean this gives you an idea of the flexibility and the and the control and really just the amount of variation you can do to these things you can combine things in so many different ways that's why some of the sound designers like Richard Devine for example says this thing is amazing that you can edit so many parameters very cool so I'm gonna add just one more parameter how about we we say part settings and I want to maybe put I don't know variation send to the super knob there's three different parameters assigning to the super knob the variation sent in this case is the chorus give you the chorus effect FM sound from the dx7 now has all this cool motion happening motion control that's what it's about now I remember I've got everything muted and soloed out here so I'm gonna touch my part select mute solo and I'm going to turn off my solo section and I'll just touch performance home remember every time I touch performance home boom it gets me right back to where we started so what have I created here let's find out [Music] [Music] that's pretty cool [Music] [Music] [Music] sound control mobility that's the Modi ex synthesizer once again this is Blake Angeles from Yamaha here with my friends at Kraft music thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Kraft Music

Views: 208,057

Keywords: Yamaha, MODX, MODX6, MODX7, MODX8, FM Synthesis, Super Knob, Synthesizer, Yamaha Montage

Id: 2pOUrS5fiiA

Length: 36min 47sec (2207 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 26 2018