Disklavier

Hello Everyone,

In a message dated 9/2/01 11:53:04 AM, midi.magic@... writes:

<< I tried to play the PianoSoft-Plus disk Star Wars number 00502000 on 
my Clavinova CVP 107.
The Backings worked fine but no Piano!!!!...>>

I am not sure exactly what is going on behind the scenes, but I believe that 
it boils down to this: Thus far, Yamaha Corporation of America has published 
all of its Disklavier floppy-disk software in a format that is playable on 
all models of Disklavier that have been sold in the US. This means that these 
performances have been recorded in E-SEQ format (rather than SMF) and have 
been published on double-density disks (rather than high-density disks).

There are older Disklaviers out there that did not have a built-in tone 
generator and whose owners subsequently added an external one, such as a 
TG-100 or MU50. Many of those older Disklaviers will play piano tracks on 
both the piano and the external tone generator unless something is done to 
mute the sound of the piano tracks on the tone generator.

I believe that many Yamaha Disklavier disks have been released over the years 
with a volume message (controller 7) that sets the volume of the piano tracks 
to 0. This message is ignored by the older Disklaviers but observed by the 
tone generators. Therefore, these disks play just fine on the older 
instruments: the piano parts play on the piano and the other parts play on 
the tone generator.

More recent model Disklaviers with the built-in tone generators have been 
engineered to respond to the volume message for the piano part but have been 
specially programmed to set the volume of the piano part to 100 when the MIDI 
message says to set it to 0. In other words, the newer Disklaviers with the 
internal tone generators also play these disks as intended.

Your message suggests that the issue is not the volume message but a system 
exclusive message. I am not familiar with this technique, but I presume that 
it is designed to address the same issue.

Although these Disklavier disks are technically compatible with the Clavinova 
CVP instruments (i.e. E-SEQ format, DD disks, et cetera), they were probably 
not intended to be played on them.

<<The piano part is now there but the backings drown it out, so I will 
have to rebalance it. >>

Because these disks were mastered on the Disklavier, the balances of the 
piano part relative to the accompaniment tracks will be different.

Regards,
PianoBench