Sound Settings

It does occur to me that what is the point in upgrading to a new instrument if the one you have is still not being used to it's full potential. A prime example of this is, "When setting up panel memories, how often do you use the sound setting pages"? The answer, I get when talking to people on my help line is "fairly often", but then usually only to set the amount of sustain to be used. For those of you that haven't tried the facility, try this: Press "Sound" then select "Sound Setting". Once done there are a couple of options that could probably use further attention. Sustain is the obvious one. If you use a sound with sustain switched on when playing, (lets use strings as an example) the default value is set at six. On many occasions this value is too high and a shorter length is needed to avoid notes running over the top of each other, thus you should reduce the value. Whilst this is only a general rule, the faster the piece you are playing, the shorter the length of sustain needed and therefore the lower the value that should be set. All reasonably obvious you might say, but how about things like Pan. This is where the sounds you are playing appear to come from either the left or right speaker or somewhere in between depending on the value set. Much is made nowadays (when recording) of where the instruments appear to sit and because of the quality of modern stereo, it is possible to make your performance much more appealing with some attention to these settings. If you are listening to a band or orchestra then the musicians don't all sit on top of each other but in a line across the stage. Panning is a way of trying to emulate the effect this causes. In reality it means that panning instruments to different places will probably mean when your song is played, the individual instruments will stand out a little more and the whole thing should sound a little less cluttered. One of the new features of the 5000 is the octave up and down buttons. While it is a little harder to set, the same thing can be achieved on the 3000. The way to do this is to use the "Key" button on the sound setting page. The advantage to doing this here is right 1 and 2 can be set with different values. Work in multiples of twelve (the number of semitones in an octave) and depending on a + or - value the sounds of the different instruments played will be moved up or down. An example here would be to set strings on right two with a Key value of 0 and a trumpet on right one with a Key value of +12. The name of the game is experiment, try changing these values and when you are happy with the effect then save this, and/or any of the above, to a panel memory and then to disk. Take some time with this and it will be well worth the effort and these little changes will make a difference to your whole performance.

John Romero.