Over the weekend , I sat down to see how easy it would be to put some simple demos together with the XS. It was a blast and only took about an hour and half to make 33 short demos ! Normally this would have taken a couple of days of complex sequence programming. Hope you enjoy them as they are focused on letting you hear the sounds, not on showing off how many notes can be played in 30 seconds.

The voice demos were created by selecting a voice, and using a neat feature in the XS Mix Mode called “ Voice with parameter” . When this parameter is turned on and you select a voice, it will copy the the 5 Arpeggios selected in Voice Mode to the Mix as well as any knob offsets to the filter cutoff , resonance. There is also a Mix Job called Copy Voice Common. This Job lets you copy the Common Edit effect settings of the Voice assigned to the specified Part to the current Mix. This comes in handy when a certain Voice has effect settings like Reverb and Chorus that you want to use in Mix Mode.

Using these two features you can immediately get the voice working in Mix exactly like it was in Voice Mode. I was able to do all the Voice demos in about a half hour.

The Performance demos with the exception of two (TP with extra Brass and Clav parts and Arps , a trancy kind of thing that ahd some more synchronized arps added) were all performed in real time in one take.

These “demos” are all basically three chords-D minor, B flat and G minor. The idea was to allow everyone to see how easy it is to get different types of music and moods out of the XS from different performances even when playing the same notes.

Making these demos extremely simple, you focus on the sound and the arps without the notes the player is playing getting in the way.

My favorites are Ohashio which is simply holding down four notes on the keyboard and letting the sound evolve for 8 measures. I am not touching any controllers, it’s just the envelopes and random LFOs that are making this sound continuously evolve liek ti was a complete sound track.

The Performance Kogarashi uses a Ney sound with Legato and pitch bend on the ribbon which is incredibly expressive and lots of fun to play.

So go ahead and critize the playing as much as you want because I didn't do that much .

By the way, if you are wondering what the Japanese sounding names mean – well, they don’t mean anything. Dan , one of the programmers from the UK has been programming for Yamaha synths for years and always comes up with a theme for names of his samples, voices, and performances. On one synth his naming theme was diseases, so there was Maleria, Bubonic, etc.

This time,he thought it would be fun to make up Japanese sounding names that had no meaning at all. I speak Japanese so at first iI was trying to figure out what these names meant until i looked and saw that Dan was the Voice creator. I'd be punked by a sound designer !