Thank Phil, great article 😉

This is a great performance, I have previously tried to pull apart a few mega arps with the MO6 as they blow me away, don't think Ive heard these guitar parts as expressed here. Guessing I never stumbled on them b4....? I think I need to review more of the Mega parts I haven't played with before. Are these arps assigned to any out of the box Montage performances, or just there for us to discover on our own. Looking now for these bad boys and going to look for additional ones to try on other mega guitars. I am so early on the FM side, I just don't think I would ever get to the point of taking on a mega voice arp myself.... this one is very fun, and sounds great.

The "Mega" concept in Yamaha synths has been around since at least Motif ES circa 2003 which was borrowed from Tyros series (circa 2002). You can use [CATEGORY SEARCH] to look for the search term "Mega", or look at the data list and search for "Mega". Although that also turns up things like "Megaphone". The ARP list has a key text string of "[Mg]" for the "Mega Voice" type arps - so you can search for that.

FYI - "[Mg]" shows up 1,817 times in this Montage Data List:

http://download.yamaha.com/api/asset/file/?language=en&site=uk.yamaha.com&asset_id=67294

... use the latest available data list - only linking this one since it appeared first in a search for an online link.

For performances - more of what you were asking for - the search would remain as "Mega". From the same link above page 13 shows performances 1544-1587 as "Mega" guitar and bass performances. Then on page 18 performances 1846 and 1847 are a couple more "Mega" guitar performances.

Not suggesting this is the complete list (there may be performances without the term "Mega" that employ "[Mg]" arps - such as multi-instrument performances that include a bass and/or guitar). But this at least gets you several "out of the box" experience performances setup using the "Mega" concept. A more complete list would be a search on "[Mg]" arps with the "where used" (performance) concept. Not aware of a tool to do this at the moment.

Are these arps assigned to any out of the box Montage performances, or just there for us to discover on our own. Looking now for these bad boys and going to look for additional ones to try on other mega guitars.

The concept of the Mega Voice is as old as using Velocity to switch between digital samples - the Slap bass made it into the General MIDI (GM) sound set way back in the early ‘90s - you can think of it as the archetype of all MegaVoices... The term itself was used in the original Tyros for the Guitar and Bass Voices used for the Accompaniment (in fact they were not and are not designed to be played in the normal fashion, but to be precisely triggered by pre-recorded MIDI events where velocity can be repeated).

Because musicians, when offered anything like Styles or Arpeggios, will demand that they be programmable (whether or not they actually ever Program their own, notwithstanding) - the demand is usually accompanied by the obligatory “I can do better!” But for those that do dig in, it is these little things, that Yamaha learned early on, that can make an emulative sound come to life.

Early days of sampling, you heard nothing but very very clean sounds. So squeaky clean to be devoid of any of the details you find among the Mega Voice Samples. The guitars had no finger noises, those were routinely removed, Muted tones, Dead notes, unheard of... customers would complain bitterly if any (what are now considered) organic noises where present. In reality, no musical instrument is devoid of these tiny details... (in reality there are no perfect musical instruments) early samplers tried to remove these things as unwanted artifacts. But as the technology matured, slowly so did the customer.

Early on in FM programming the word “stuff” became a term regularly used among programmers to refer to these additional sonic details that accompany any musical instrument tone. In FM “stuff” is the extra noise often at KeyOff that not only makes playing the sound ‘feel right’ but sound right, where used. The key to using these noises properly is all about the balance (mix).

The mechanical noise of the Rhodes piano is an example... I can play that for customers and you can tell by the laughter in portions of the audience who among them actually owned a Rhodes. Others ask “what’s that supposed to be?”

In the “Rd1 Gallery” (a Gallery being several versions of sound each slightly different), Part 1 is a felt hammer Rhodes, Part 2 is a rubber hammer Rhodes, Part 3 is an improved preamp Rhodes, Part 4 is the Dyno-my-Rhodes modification, and Part 5, mixed in a little bit with each of the other via SCENEs, is the mechanical noise + the sound of tines/tone bars unamplified. While not technically speaking Mega... it is part of the same conversation to emulate the additional sounds made when performing music (you can, however, take this too far... but that’s another conversation).

But those sounds actually titled MegaVoice, while they add artful noises, started in order to make more realistic strums on guitars, and add fingers-on-string noises for bass... mainly for the automated accompaniment and later in the Motif series when Yamaha redefined the Arpeggiator by turning it into musical chord intelligent phrases.

When implemented in the synthesizer (where it is anticipated the customer wants programmability) instead of always stacking the articulation vertically, many of the “noises” and articulations were mapped both above and below the normal range of the instrument in question. Each MIDI map has 128 Notes from C-2 through G8, so there is plenty of room to add these above and below the standard guitar or bass tuning.

This makes them far, far easier to “paint” them into your Track via simple overdubbing.
Attempting to actually play them and/or build your own Mega Arps... sure it’s available but I don’t anticipate that many actually can do it better than the Factory, but I am always ready to be proven wrong (creating Arps is really a Factory thing..) using the remapped articulations, artfully, is much more practical... easier to reach, easier to use, and gets the job done.

As I suspected, The Factory team is awesome.... Playing the Mega Arps has to be much more fun than making them. Even the wife was saying how great they sound as I was rolling thru many of them last night. I am finding alot of the configs I thought would be factory and nothing I would edit ..... that I would never touch MO, I am getting into on Montage. Menu diving is much easier, and I am just now getting comfortable with part assignments, and SuperKnob configs which makes this board just a blast to play with. Next on my list is to try to understand how you got some of those killer FM DX bass and keyboard sounds. This seems much more accessible than say arp programming although the FM stuff is like a magical mystery tour to me... on what is going on physically, but my ears seem to understand....., getting a good FM sound from scratch and comparing what comes out of the factory.... I think is my next 4 years of learning. In the meantime, Ill take more Mega arps from the factory please :p

Well you’re in luck... a series of articles by one of the best FM programmer’s on the planet, Dr. Manny Fernandez, will be starting shortly.

The programming of FM-X is going to be far more engaging than making arpeggios. Making your own sounds is far more rewarding, as well.

Bad Mister wrote:
The mechanical noise of the Rhodes piano is an example... I can play that for customers and you can tell by the laughter in portions of the audience who among them actually owned a Rhodes. Others ask “what’s that supposed to be?”
.

Is the CF3 Hammer return / pull off really as loud as the key off element in the moXF full concert grand?????
I initially thought my board had a key problem until I checked the voice.
Also the velocity follow is odd. On a 'real' piano you can dig in but hold then release slowly so it doesn't follow that a 'pull off' should be loud as well!

Just a thought.