User Tone Editing

[Carter]

Here's an in depth take from Keyboard Magazine review of Casio MZ-X500 :

 

Sound editing goes much deeper than I expected in an arranger at this price point: filter cutoff and resonance; amp attack, decay, and release; entry volume, and velocity sensitivity are adjustable per Tone from the first editing screen. Hitting the Advanced icon takes you to even more fine-grained control, including graphical pitch, volume, and filter envelopes. You also get independent and highly programmable LFOs for pitch, filter, and amp (volume). Effects settings are editable per Tone as well, and you can save your creations as User Tones. There’s no “oscillator” editing; any User Tone begins with the multi-sample of some factory Tone. If that makes the MZ-X500 less than a full and true synthesizer, it’s only just barely..........

 

Now with that in mind, is this saying that - MZ-X500 can further edit user tones which includes tones (.wav samples) loaded from Sample Manager software?

 

 

 

[Brad Saucier]

Yes

[anotherscott]

On 11/20/2018 at 12:00 PM, Carter said:

There’s no “oscillator” editing; any User Tone begins with the multi-sample of some factory Tone. If that makes the MZ-X500 less than a full and true synthesizer, it’s only just barely..........

 

Inside the hexlayer editing, at least, the selectable factory tones for each layer include sine, triangle, sawtooth, square, pulse.

[Carter]

On 11/22/2018 at 2:29 PM, anotherscott said:

 

Inside the hexlayer editing, at least, the selectable factory tones for each layer include sine, triangle, sawtooth, square, pulse.

And I don't really know what that means.

 

[anotherscott]

It means that the assertion...

Quote

There’s no “oscillator” editing; any User Tone begins with the multi-sample of some factory Tone

...is false. At least if I understood what they meant by that, as "oscillator editing" is an ambiguous phrase. One can't ever literally edit an oscillator. I think the author meant that, when you edit a sound, you can't choose which oscillator it uses, so that the only way to make use of a particular oscillator is to find some factory preset that already uses that oscillator and use that as the starting point for your new sound. But that's not true. In the hexlayers, you can go into each of the 6 parts, and choose the waveform you want to work with.  So for example, if you want to create a synth sound around a sawtooth waveform, you don't actually have to begin with a factory Tone that is already built around a sawtooth waveform. For each part of a hexlayer, you can pick sawtooth, or whatever oscillator waveform you want.

[Jokeyman123]

Right Scott. An oscillator is the electronic circuit used to create whatever sound it is designed to create-of course now done digitally by referencing wavtables but originally designed specifically to create a sawtooth, sine, pulse or other type of wave-in the analog domain. I know, I used to build oscillator circuits when I first began my training as a tech many eons ago.

 

My PX560 works the same way. Brad has posted some stuff about this for me when I was asking the same questions. Individual tones have the raw wav samples preselected, but if I place an individual tone in one of the hex layers, now I can access the basic wav, change it to a different wav sample or use the same as it is already selected in the tone and now I can see what it is-and do this differently for each of the 6 tones in the hex layer. Entering edit in the hex layer-choose "layer" from the menu and go from there. Interesting too because now one can see the individual wav samples used for sounds that need more than one basic wav sample, such s the acoustic pianos and others. Plus, at leas with the PX560, not only are there editing operations when editing a tone, once in hex layer, there are further options for layering each tone within the hex layer. I have created and uploaded a few hex layers for the PX560 (I don't own the MZ-X but it seems somewhat similar in design.  Some crazy stuff can be created just with for example 6 sawtooth-based tones. and since now in hex mode you can access any and every basic wav in our Casios-woo-hoo!

[mike71]

My idea on how it works the synth engine on the PX-5S. Basically you have a series of wavetable oscillators that read some waveforms from the Flash Rom. You could use them as tone or drums, where you have a preset setup, and a tone could be made with a series of wavetables, you could modify somewhat the sound with alowpass filter and you could control partially the DCA with an offset, if you try to edit a tone you'll sometime obtain counterintuitive effects. Try modify the ADSR on Rock Piano, you''ll get totally weird sounds.

On the other branch you have the hex layer, where you can control al the six oscillators selecting the wavetable, and you could generate from scratch a waveform, You can't sync the oscillators (correct me if I am wrong) or use a ring modulator or AM modulator between them but you could obtan wery fat sounds, look at the Farfisa stage setting, for instance.

 

Speaking for the PX-5S all this power is hidden behind the tiny LCD screen and the confusing user manuals, unfortunately. And yes, my other synth is a Kawai K5000, at least the LCD screen is bigger