Control a Keyboard with PC

[RussellS]

Hi, I hope someone can offer me some advice.

My 14 year old son has a Yamaha DGX-620 keyboard/piano on which he has regular private lessons for both keyboard and piano. He has just joined with some school friends and formed a band and it is here that we are having some problems.

One piece that they are practicing at the moment requires the keyboard instrument to change a few times during the piece, however this requires a few key presses on the keyboard to select the instrument and cannot be done quickly enough and the keyboard in question does not have any "one touch" programmable keys for this. The keyboard does have programmable keys but these are still not one touch and require a key sequence to select.

I was wondering if the keyboard was connected to a PC with the USB MIDI interface is there any software available that could change the sound by sending the required MIDI command to the keyboard. I would imagine that if this was available then you could program keys to perform this change quickly.

Can anyone give any advice on this please

Many thanks

Russell

 

[dementedchord]

seems to me any good sequencer would send midi cc#'s you'll have to locate it in the softwares manual... seems pretty drastic just to change voices... but maybe he'll learn the prog and do more with it...

 

[dintymoore]

The problem is that when you change from one sound to another it actually involves 3 messages. For instance, when you change to Gamelean Gongs (pg 126 of your manual) the keyboard needs to get the following 3 commands:

1. CC 000 = 000
2. CC 032 = 098
3. PRG Change = 113

The first two messages are the MSB and LSB, which are the bank select.

If I took the day off I know that you could program what you want with MidiPipe on a Mac, and that's free.

The Evolution (M-Audio) products do that and the cheapest way I know would be to get a cheap one and slave your Yamaha off of that, but you are probably looking at a bit of $.

You could use any sequencer program (like Reaper) and record the above messages into a short 1/10th second sequence. That would work. If you played the sequences back on the almost free Mac app QMIDI then you could have the sequence advance each time and it would be 1 button.

But all of this is a bit complicated. The easiest remedy would seem to be to slave it off of a product that sends out al three messages when you press one button, and all of the Evolution keyboards I've had do that, as do many of the M-Audio and Evolution products like the Evolution UC33e ($100 used).

 

[RussellS]

Thanks for the replies.

For the moment we've taken a different approach. I remembered that his first keyboard (Yamaha PSR-275) was still in the loft gathering dust. So, I got it down and rigged it up above the DGX-620 in a two tier setup and have the two required voices set up, one on each keyboard. This is working very well and my son is very pleased with it. I just need to get a proper two tier stand (or modify the existing one) to make a more permanent solution.

As my son gets more into performing I will look more into the MIDI software etc but at the moment we don't know anything about it and need to do some research.

Anyway, thanks for the help and I'm sure I will be back for more advice in the future.


Russell