All very true; hence why I said the same few guitar samples explode into several hundred with different DSP's (which drastically change the sound). Do they reuse the same samples for different voices? yup, with heavy modifications; for example the main CFX and BOsendorfer pianos on most Clavinovas are repurposed into "Bright","Mellow" and often "Ambient" versions.I can't speak to those voices in particular, but in general, on any keyboard with many sounds, many will be variations based on the same samples. Even a typical simple digital piano with a few different piano sounds are usually using the same samples for all of them. But I think you are unfairly diminishing the value of these additional sounds that are variations based on the same sample set.All above voices come from a single (root) voice, where only different settings are applied. And yes, they all come from good old GM&XG voice. That is, it's the same as there would only be one piano voice which you then edit according to your liking.
1. On many boards (and I'd be surprised if the SX is not among them), the editing that makes one sound sound different from another one that shares the same samples can involve changing parameters that are not user accessible. Yamaha arrangers do not permit nearly the same level of editing as e.g. the Montage series, and I would be surprised if Yamaha limits their arranger sound variations to only those relatively few adjustments that are user-accessible on the arranger itself. (Along these lines, I had this related though: you suggested turning touch sensitivity off when comparing those piano sounds... but two sounds may play differently in-part because of different velocity-to-sample mapping, and that could be a change you might not notice with touch sensitivity off, but would be a change that you could not recreate with the available editing functions.)
2. Even on a Montage, where all the editing tools are provided, without examining the parameters themselves, the average user is not likely to have the ears/skills to know how to edit Montage sound X to sound the same as the same-samples-based Montage sound Y, even if Montage sound Y could be listened to as a reference, to say nothing of if it could not. Or to bring it back to your example, even if all those piano sounds are based on the same samples, what if your favorite piano there was, say, AmbientPiano S.Art but the only piano voice on the board was that GM&XG GrandPiano that you have concluded they are all based on? Even if every edit required to turn GM&XG GrandPiano into AmbientPiano S.Art is in fact user-accessible (which may or may not be the case), would you know how to make it sound like that? Especially if you didn't have the actual AmbientPiano S.Art available to listen to as a reference? (I think this is further complicated because S.Art functions can alter how something plays, and IIRC, there are no user-available editing parameters for that.)
I think that, to the average user, even if based on the same samples, having instant access to all these sounds (including being able to compare them and select the best sounding one for a particular performance) is still very useful... for most people's purposes, that's the difference between having these sound variations and not, since most people are probably not going to be adept at creating them themselves, to whatever extent that is indeed possible.
Bogdan, I *can* tell you that the GM/XG sounds are absolutely *not* the same as the "showpiece" piano samples; *however* in some cases (especially on portables) they just reference back to the nicer one automatically. THey don't want you to hear how bad the default GM one sounds :p (which you can sorta listen to anyway by loading the "KSP" one), if that makes sense?
What is crazy is that there *are* samples on the sx700/sx900 that don't exist on the G1! (I'm not talking about expansion packs. PizzGLocken, HalfWAh lead is a completely different sample; I tried applying the same dsp to other guitar sounds, never found one with the exact same behavior!)
Mark
Statistics: Posted by amwilburn — Sat Aug 24, 2024 11:18 pm