Montage was designed primarily to play PARTs 9-16 using an external controller/DAW. If you wish to use these under local control (more than one PART 9-16 at a time) then you are traveling down a not-so-intended path. It's like using a credit card to open a door. Not intended use. There are creative ways to get things done. The creative solutions were not intended - design should be judged by intended use.

It is fair to.provide feedback that 8 locally simultaneously controlled PARTs is not enough. This would get more to the heart of the issue for you. And you would be joining a population of other users who have previously voiced the same observation.

I'm using them for my Roli Seaboard. It uses the top 8 parts for its own purposes and I have the bottom 8 for 'normal' playing.

would you please tell me if you are using a computer to connect the roli to the yamaha?

I found a typo in an older post of mine. Corrected it.

The message system still has a bug that if you edit a post - the entire thread will revert its date back to the date of your original post - thus possibly burying the thread with a false "old" timestamp. This post is merely meant to "bump" it back to work around the message board's issue.

Massimo posted an update 47 minutes ago - but my edit buried the thread. Courtesy bump.

Montage was designed primarily to play PARTs 9-16 using an external controller/DAW. If you wish to use these under local control (more than one PART 9-16 at a time) then you are traveling down a not-so-intended path.
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Ahhh... this really clears things up. My question is, where does it say that PARTs 9-16 are intended for external use? I didn't see it in the manuals... maybe I didn't read the manuals well enough.

Hi! I made this tutorial, I hope you find it useful. Thank you.

I use 9-16 for sequencing of drums, bass and other instruments/sounds in songs.

I just came across this video. It appears that we might be able to pair up PARTs 9-16 with PARTs 1-8

@Bad Mister can you verify if this video is legit and this is possible or not?

TUTORIAL: HOW TO CREATE A 16 PARTS PERFORMANCE | YAMAHA MONTAGE / MODX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F2Tfb8Ebtk

You can control Parts 9-16 using Parts 1-8 with a loopback cable. This has been discussed since 2016.

Darryl, as Jason said, it works... As you probably know, each of the 8 keyboard playable Parts can be set to play an internal sound, an external sound (via the Zone Master function), or both. What the MIDI Out-to-In connection does is allows the first 8 Parts to "see" Parts 9-16 as external sounds, same as if you connected that MIDI cable instead to some other external sound module.

The problem (or limitation) is that you still only have 8 separate Parts to manipulate, regardless of the fact that they are being used for 16 sounds. In other words, for example, if you have Part 2 triggering the "internal" Part 2 sound AND an "external" sound (which in the case of the video, happens to be the board's own Part 10 sound), changing the Part volume with slider 2 will change the volume of both sounds. That's why, even though you CAN have both an internal and external sound on the same Part, it is usually best to use a given Part for either an internal or an external sound in any given Performance, rather than using it for both simultaneously.

So yes, it works, and it's cool that you can do it, and it may solve a problem in a given situation, but it doesn't really change the board from an 8 Part (keyboard-controllable) board to a 16 Part one. It's still basically functioning as 8 Parts, even though each Part can have two sounds.

CHUONG: My wish for the "feature" to be available to PARTs 9-16 was specific to one use case in which PARTs 1-8 represent my "top keyboard" and PARTs 9-16 the "bottom keyboard" (controlled by an external controller...I don't change the sounds for the "bottom keyboard" often i.e. they are my favourite A.piano, E.piano, Pad and Strings for 95% of the time and I guess many keyboard players use the same approach.

This also possibly gets back to another discussion about being able to "lock" a Part so that it wouldn't change when you invoke a new Performance. Then, if your external board was playing a piano sound that resided in Part 9 of your Montage, and you locked it into place, you'd be able to freely select from other Performances that would change what Parts 1-8 were playing from the Montage's own keys, while leaving your externally triggered piano sound unaffected. If this sounds appealing, you can upvote the idea at https://yamahasynth.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Use-Live-Set-to-Load-Only-SOME-Parts/218963-45978

JOHN: My question is, where does it say that PARTs 9-16 are intended for external use? I didn't see it in the manuals... maybe I didn't read the manuals well enough.

I don't think it says it explcitly. The manuals mostly show what something does and maybe how to do something, but don't really tell you why or "what for?" And all manuals tend to be reluctant to point out what you can't do. 😉 In this case, it's kinda there if you read between the lines. The manual does point out that only the first 8 Parts have KBD CTRL (Keyboard Control). So you do have to take the leap from there... hmmm, if the other 8 Parts do not have keyboard control, how are you supposed to control them? To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, once you've ruled out internal control, external control must be the answer! And that external control could be anything that can send MIDI to the board, whether it's a DAW, a hardware sequencer, another keyboard (or as discussed in the scenario that began this post, with a MIDI cable, even the board's own keys can be seen as an "external" MIDI source, if those keys are configured to send MIDI to external zones). So there are numerous wasy Parts 9-16 can be used. But directly addressing them from the keys in conjunction with any/all of the first 8 Parts is not among them. (They CAN be played from the internal keys individualy, though, which permits some other tricks.)

Loopback has caveats and limitations for sure. Although it's not like having 16 independent parts - it's not like having just 8 either. Although the keyboard control slider movement will change the linked Part's slider by MIDI - the linked Part (which is in the range of 9-16) has its own slider that will not affect the the keyboard-control Part. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, you cannot select the control surface to place sliders 9-16 in front of you without the system automatically selecting a Part within this range. This is a bit screwy to me since there's even the option to show only 4 parts at a time and touch a box of a range such as 9-12 and it seems if I don't tell it any specific Part the instrument should just leave the selected Part alone. And otherwise there isn't a way to change the LED to Parts 9-16 that I am aware of (showing you the slider are for that range) while not affecting the selecting Part. I wish there was a way to select "Common" (Part) without the system forcing Parts 1-8 to be shown so you can have Parts 9-16 by control surface while having (at least) no Part selected.

At any rate - that aside - you can use superknob since it's the same everywhere to offset volumes of any Part independent of the slider setting so this can be used for the volume control you otherwise cannot get to with the sliders.

Also, changing Parts doesn't necessarily send the slider volume - so you could do something slightly awkward (if volume was your goal in control) by switching to a Part 9-16 then use the slider to adjust the volume then switch back to Part 1-8 (or select common meaning no Part selected). The sliders of 9-16 will not adjust or alter Parts 1-8.

And then you can use other controllers like the common assignable knobs to adjust the level of Parts 9-16 independently. Or use (for montage) ribbon. Or assignable switches or ... There are more options available than just being stuck with control over only 8 Parts at a time. It's work ... but available.

At some point it probably becomes more efficient to get a 16-channel MIDI controller so you can have 16 zones and use it to control the keyboard without having to resort to "funny business". And by that I mean utilizing the instrument with "hacks" that inference would tell you are not intended usage.

Good workarounds, Jason, but yes, also getting into "unnatural acts" that seem counter to the intended usage, as you put it, and often things that could be awkward in the moment of performance, when--while playing--you just want to quickly adjust the volume of one of those "paired" sounds on one of your 8 Parts. So again, it's cool that you can do it, as an occasional problem solver, but if this is really a facility you regularly need, a board that is actually designed to give you 16 Part control might be the better solution for you, as you say.

I don't think volume is the only compromise, either, though I'm not sure of all the ins and outs. But for example, let's say you "gang up" parts 2 and 10 so that they both play from Part 2 using this loopback method... can you still assign independent key ranges for the two sounds?

Thanks @Jason & @AnotherScott!

I do remember now reading something about the loopback thing prior to purchasing my Montage, so the explanations didn't really sink back then as they do now, since I didn't have much of a handle on or understanding of how the Montage worked.

I realize that adding KBD CTRL to PARTs 9-16 is a pipe dream. However I did add an idea to Ideascale several months back that would allow us to utilize PARTs 1-8 better and with many more options for layers/spits. The idea is similar to the adding KBD CTRL to Scenes idea, except they would add controlling the Elements' On/Off Switch for PARTs 1-8 instead:

Add Element ON/OFF Switch Control to 'Scenes'
https://yamahasynth.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Add-Element-ON-OFF-Switch-Control-to-Scenes/259029-45978

Although I don't know all the effort that it would require to re-engineer/program the OS for this functionality, it seems like something that could potentially be an easy one for Yamaha to do, since we can easily manually press an Element On or Off in a Performance, much like we can easily manually press KBD CTRL On or Off...

Key ranges and velocity ranges are independent. Most things are. It's the MIDI send you have to worry about. Which - you do have some amount of control considering Zone Master is a key component of this setup. You could turn off transmit of Vol/Exp, for example, to prevent the 1-8 Part from changing the linked 9-16 Part from changing volume. The focus on the sliders about covers what one would be worried about since the other MIDI controllers (ribbon, assignable switches 1&2, etc) are generally used in a "global" fashion meaning they are already transmitted as the same value to every channel.

Myself, I hardly do any dynamic changes using the sliders. If I have to change levels instantaneously I would use scenes. At times if I need something to decay in volume (like a slow pull of the slider aka fade) I would automate this with a piano key trigger and use a motion sequence (arp based). This is even without using 9-16. Because for the moment my usage of the keyboard primarily is focused on piano keys, pitch bend, and scene buttons. And that's it once a tune starts. That said - we're all different in usage so this is not meant to be conveying anything universal.

If you only have one of the two linked Parts that really needs volume control by sliders then you could (also) configure say the 9-16 Part so it has expression receive turned off. Then slider adjustments would only impact one of the two Parts.

There are lots of options of hoops to jump through. This may be useful in certain situations if one is willing.

Myself, I hardly do any dynamic changes using the sliders. If I have to change levels instantaneously I would use scenes.

Yeah, I don't ever touch the sliders and use Scenes for all level changes too 😉
For some songs I even have the DAW recorded/edited sequencing set to change the Scenes for me automatically & thereby changing the levels automatically, especially when I'm playing something on the keys that leaves me little to no time for pressing the Scene buttons...