We moved your post to the Montage forum as it does not concern 'reface'.

The Montage can layer and/or split up to 8 PARTS, each PART can be made up of as many as 8 Elements if it is a "normal" AWM2 sound, 8 Operators if it is an FM-X sound and 73 Elements if it is a "drum" kit sound. A sound like the "CFX Concert" is made up of four PARTS and contains 18 Elements. A sound like the "Seattle Sections" is made up of 22 Elements and is seven PARTS.

The number of PARTS is not typically used to create thicker sounds (you have FM-X as a thickening agent 🙂 ... ) The additional Elements are most often used to bring in different articulations or entirely different instruments. The Montage takes care of dynamically allocating resources based on the way you play (velocity) or move the controls (Motion Control). So not all Elements are making sound at once, they can be swapped under certain conditions of the Motion Control Engine - this greatly broadens the area you can cover musically in your performing. For example, the 22 Elements that make up the string sound come in and are removed by the placement of the Super Knob... you can morph the full orchestra (1st violin section, 2nd violin section, viola section, cello section, contrabass section) to a small ensemble featuring a violin, a viola and a cello, or with another controller you can change to a different bow stroke all together. So the way the programmers put together the sounds is for wider breadth of musical gestures you can recreate in real time.

Not just simply layering one sound on top of another... you could do that, but that would not give you the dynamic changes you get with Montage. The Choir that morphs into Choir+Strings, that then morphs into Choir+Strings+Pipe Organ is a perfect example of how Motion Control is used to dynamically create a musical montage!

As to picking "any 8 sounds" to layer and split... You can pick any 8 Parts. A "Part" can be a complete instrument sound, or it can be one complex component in building an instrument. In other words, there are Parts that are complete musical instruments by themselves, ready to play. There are others that are just a particular musical component, a building block used in creating a very detailed musical instrument. For example, you might find a Part that is just the sound of mechanical noise of a Rhodes, or just the acoustic piano's soft strikes, or just the leakage noise of a Leslie speaker. Any Part from any Performance can be accessed for your creation, for example, you want to add the solo violin/solo viola/solo cello Part from the Seattle Sections, you copy just that into your Performance. This makes creating your own sounds extremely easy/rewarding and fun.

But in general, yes, you can combine any 8 Parts for simultaneous "Keyboard Control", and you can map them across the keys and region them velocity-wise as you see fit.

Thanks, I believe I'm understanding this, so for example, if I wanted to build a 3 way split, of Piano, strings, and brass, I would have to pick sounds, that would total 8 parts for this to work? or at least remove some parts that I feel I can do without? but the most is 8 parts for the 3-way split or layer?

Thanks again