I can't speak for the problem with the oboe, but do you keep in mind, that unlike single performances, when combining multiple parts, they all share commonly the aux effects. Because of that the parts necessarily sound different as opposed to when they are the only active part in a performance. Regarding the note stealing "effect", maybe that appears because there is an arpeggiator active? You can check for the bluish arp box which is "lit" on the display if the arp is active.

COMBINING PARTS IN A PERFORMANCE DO SOMETIMES CHANGE THE PARTS
I don't understand why, if I add a new part to a performance, sometimes the sound of one of the parts change. I thought I could, without any limitations, blend parts together until 8 parts. But it happens that often that I am frustrated about it, what do I overlook? Or is my Montage not properly working. Sometimes for example the oboe stops having any release or the added violins sounds crappy like a cheap synthesizer or the acoustic guitar sounds weird. Also on occasion there was some note stealing with only 3 parts just playing 4 notes at the same time. If I go back to the parts original performance the sound is perfect again.
I can't detect any logic behind it. Could anybody help me out of here?

If programming great sounds was easy everyone would be a great programmer. Before you begin combining sounds, it would probably be wise to understand the synth architecture. The following will hopefully be helpful in understanding why sounds may indeed change when you “merge” or “copy” a Part.

As correctly mentioned in the post above, Effects are one of the things that are likely to change.... “System Effects” are likely different. So an understanding of the Effects and signal routing is a requirement before embarking on making your own great sounds.

Also you need to know, on a much more fundamental level, that the Performance COMMON parameters from one program will necessarily be different from the COMMON parameters of another. “Common” parameters are, as the name implies, those that every Part of the Performance shares in common.

Here’s an example of how that works.
Say you have three members of a band...
A guitar player who owns a distortion and a wah pedal.
A bass player who has compressor and overdrive
A organ player who has a Rotary Speaker and overdrive

When playing at home each of these musicians has a different size practice room... the guitar player practices in his garage; the bass player practices in her bedroom; while the organ player practices in his basement.

The effects they own personally are called “Insertion Effects”. Literally, their instrument is inserted into these effect. The room acoustics are recreated by the “System Effects.” When you merge these ‘musicians’ in a Performance they can bring along their personal Insertion Effects but they cannot each bring along the garage, the bedroom or the basement.

In fact when they get together to play they *share* the same room acoustics!

You can have all of them gather at the guitar players house... where they all SHARE the room acoustics of the garage. This analogy should help you understand the allocation of effects.

If you’ve ever been in a professional recording studio or played in a band that had a mixer that everyone plugged into... you understand that the personal Insert Effects are BEFORE, the mixer... the mixer might have a couple of Auxiliary Sends that allow you to route some of each channel (to taste) to shared processing attached to the mixing console (these would be the System Effects) each instrument has a Send amount on their channel, but all instrument share these effects.

Why Effect routing evolved this way is because to make it sound like a real situation, like an orchestra at Carnegie Hall, all the musician share the same room acoustics... this shared room is far more real world because it hardly ever happens that musicians would not be in the same space when playing together... so your System Effects are typically Reverberation and some kind of Time Delay based Effect (Phase, Flanger, Chorus, Echo, multiple repeats, etc)... used to make it sound like the instruments are together in the same room environment.

When you start to edit instruments in MONTAGE, you will see that each Oscillator that makes sound can be routed to one or the other, both or neither, of the Part’s Insertion Effects A and B. They are technically a part of the instrument. Each AWM2 Element and/or FM-X Carrier can be routed to an Insert Effect... this happens just after it transverses the 3-Band EQ and before it goes to the 2-Band EQ available for each Part... It is at this point that the Part sound enters the MONTAGE’s digital mixer where you have a Reverb Send and a Variation Send (the System Effects). All Elements/Operators (the whole instrument sound) goes through the Send to the System Effects. There is also a DIRECT or “Dry Level” - it works exactly like the Aux Sends on any mixing console... you send a portion of the signal to effected. The return from the System Effects gets mixed to a stereo feed that is merged with the Main L&R Outputs.

Now... when you “merge” several Single Part Performances into a new Performance, each sound you move can bring along some of its programming but it cannot bring along the System Effect settings ( the room acoustics) of that program... it must now “share” whatever room acoustics you setup in their new home.

Making sense? It is this and any “offset” settings that may be stripped off when you “merge” or Copy Parts from one Performance to another. If you have stayed up to date on your MONTAGE firmware, you can select which of the “offset” settings get brought along...

Arps, Motion Sequences, Scene settings, Zone settings and/or MIXING settings can be transferred from one Performance to another by marking the option when making the Part Category Search selection (see the Supplemental Manual version 1.60 page 14)

From the PERFORMANCE HOME screen, if you touch “Motion Control” > “Quick Edit”
Here each Part (plus the Common) has 24 “Quick Edit” Knobs (27 parameters total) that can be used to apply “offsets” to the deeper edit parameters. Here’s what that means... say you are playing an AWM2 Single Part Instrument with 8 Elements, this means there are 8 Oscillators, 8 Filters, 8 Amplifiers... these Quick Edit parameters allow to apply an offset that affects all 8 Oscillators, all 8 Fliters and/or all 8 Amplifiers with a single parameter. Offsets can ADD to or SUBTRACT from the stored value within the actual Element. Imagine you want to affect the Amplitude Envelope Generator RELEASE setting on the 6 Element OBOE ... it could take you many button pushes to edit each of the oboe’s six Oscillators... OR using this Quick Edit Offset you can apply a change that affects all of the Part’s Oscillators in like fashion.

Truly a Quick Edit... instead of diving in an actually reprogramming the AEG of each Element, you can use the “offset”... offset parameters may be stripped off when you copy or merge a Part. Good news is you can offset the sound in its new Home.

When the sound is, as you say “perfect”, it’s probably programmed by someone who has taken the time to study the architecture, and recognize exactly what makes the sound behave as it does (“perfect”)... don’t worry, take your time. But never expect that everything just happens when you select a sound.

Each Part has 16 Source/Destination Control Sets, and the COMMON edit level has 16 Source/Destination Control Sets... not to mention the 27 Quick Edit parameters that can be offset... so there can be a lot going on.

Hope that helps.

"From the PERFORMANCE HOME screen, if you touch “Motion Control” > “Quick Edit”"

The settings made here in COMMON Quick Edit are global over the performance, so if here there is a big use of the quick edit in the copyed performance the copyed performance (again) will be very influenced by theese settings , this quick edit parameter are not copyed in the destination performance so the copyed performance now sound with the quick setting of the destination performance,

Both of you thank you very much. I must say I find it unfortunate that it an't that easy as I thought It would be. But ok I have to deal with it, I see it's a study. Badmister I understand your story, I will try to make it happen in practice. Is there a video of adjusting a more complicated performance? I watched two videos one with brass and violins en one with electric piano and strings but they didn't have any difficulties. It was just adding a part and ready to go, only adjusting some part levels and adding some reverb, very easy.

If you have an example merge you find has issues for you - why not share the two performances you are trying to merge? Also share the order you are merging: which one is your "PART 1" (first to load) and which is your 2nd performance to merge into the first.

Another "shotgun approach" tip:

Since it makes a difference - you may try reversing the order of the merge. Perhaps the performance you are currently trying to "merge in" is more dependent on global/common (including superknob-controlled offsets) settings than the other performance you were previously starting with as the base of your merge. Swap the order - and your previously "merged in" performance will be the anchor with all the settings correct for it to sound as originally programmed. The new "merged in" sound may be more tolerant of having a different set of common parameters.

Using the shotgun approach doesn't necessarily help you fix this situation (it may fix this example you're working with - but doesn't really inform you what's going on in detail) - but does serve to illustrate that you lose settings when doing a merge. This is just the nature of having shared resources (like master effects, assignable knobs tied to superknob, system effects, etc). There's nothing "wrong" with this situation - you need to be cognizant of the architecture and how to manipulate PARTs in order to "fix" taking a performance which previously had its own dedicated global parameters and merging this into a different performance with its own/different set of global parameters.

Jivan wrote:

Both of you thank you very much. I must say I find it unfortunate that it an't that easy as I thought It would be. But ok I have to deal with it, I see it's a study. Badmister I understand your story, I will try to make it happen in practice. Is there a video of adjusting a more complicated performance? I watched two videos one with brass and violins en one with electric piano and strings but they didn't have any difficulties. It was just adding a part and ready to go, only adjusting some part levels and adding some reverb, very easy.

I’m quite sure that in the videos exactly the same things were happening... this is how it works. Combining instruments it is not difficult... it’s the details that you must pay attention to... and what you inherit can vary greatly depending on the program you start with. “Doing it yourself” is quite illuminating versus watching someone else in a video. This is true of all things. The first time you rode a bike, tied your shoes, swam in the ocean, it had some challenges that perhaps when you watched someone else do these things in a video appeared to happen without any difficulties.

Certainly the goal of a video would be to show the broad strokes of how to merge PARTS into a Performance, then suggest that you edit the sounds to fit. A YouTube type video is always time-conscious and not likely to dig in as deeply as a tutorial or article. Much of sound design is exploring and finding out what makes a sound do what it does...

If you look at tweaking effects and adjusting envelopes as difficult perhaps a synthesizer is not what you want. I think this is the best part of working with it... getting the instrument sound to play/behave exactly as needed, is what it’s all about. If a Factory sound is exactly as you desire, it is probably more a coincidence than anything else. Embrace editing! You bought a synthesizer!

Jason wrote:

If you have an example merge you find has issues for you - why not share the two performances you are trying to merge? Also share the order you are merging: which one is your "PART 1" (first to load) and which is your 2nd performance to merge into the first.

Another "shotgun approach" tip:

Since it makes a difference - you may try reversing the order of the merge. Perhaps the performance you are currently trying to "merge in" is more dependent on global/common (including superknob-controlled offsets) settings than the other performance you were previously starting with as the base of your merge. Swap the order - and your previously "merged in" performance will be the anchor with all the settings correct for it to sound as originally programmed. The new "merged in" sound may be more tolerant of having a different set of common parameters.

Using the shotgun approach doesn't necessarily help you fix this situation (it may fix this example you're working with - but doesn't really inform you what's going on in detail) - but does serve to illustrate that you lose settings when doing a merge. This is just the nature of having shared resources (like master effects, assignable knobs tied to superknob, system effects, etc). There's nothing "wrong" with this situation - you need to be cognizant of the architecture and how to manipulate PARTs in order to "fix" taking a performance which previously had its own dedicated global parameters and merging this into a different performance with its own/different set of global parameters.

Was also bumping into this and reverse the order of process the other way around a handy tip.