Some video Tutorials for Korg Arranger keyboards...

Sam CA · Post by **Sam CA** » Fri Oct 12, 2012 7:25 pm

Here are some video tutorials that I made for creating/editing styles using Markers (in an external sequencer). There's some basic and also advanced tips in there. I'm planning to make more, so in case if you found them useful in a way, you can subscribe to my facebook page. (The link is down below in the signature area).

It's best if you set the playback quality in youtube to HD, and view them in full screen size. I'm an audio/music guy and not a video producer, so excuse the poor quality.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpRz7wbAr4#ws

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWhUHVw4Lwc#ws

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCm73jifwHk#ws

alfredokiwi · Post by **alfredokiwi** » Fri Oct 12, 2012 9:03 pm

Very interesting and great tutorial for everybody. Thanks to share it !!!

Asena · Post by **Asena** » Sat Oct 13, 2012 2:58 am

WELL, SAM, I must say that, this is awesome, Thank you so much, couse there is so many things to remember, and learn, video is best way., i really think this will help many people.

Shahin · Post by **Shahin** » Sat Oct 13, 2012 4:54 pm

Way to go sam !

i dont have a proxy account right now so i will definitely watch it later. keep the good job !

pippuzzo · Post by **pippuzzo** » Mon Oct 15, 2012 9:02 pm

Hi,

really good stuff Sam, nice one.

Anyway I did not get the mandatory point of inserting time signature and pan at the beginning of each style element.
This it is possibly your decision to have a straightforward explanation in the tutorial. Anyway I would like to inform you how I usually work out these:

Time signature: if you keep the same value for all the style elements you can put only one at the beginning of the midifile and it will be copied across the whole style during the import. If this is not the case your suggestion is the way to go.

Pan: if the pan has particular need you can put it on the track, otherwise better not having it in the track to keep the possibility of using the style setting pan available in Style Play. If you put this on the track you cannot more control it in style play, so you must have a strong reason to do so.

Duplicating all these commands for each style element it is boring so I try to avoid introducing them if not really necessary.
Anyway I would like to hear your comments about, maybe I'm missing something and therefore having room to improve.

Cheers.

Sam CA · Post by **Sam CA** » Mon Oct 15, 2012 10:18 pm

Thanks everybody ....glad that you found them useful.

Sam CA · Post by **Sam CA** » Mon Oct 15, 2012 11:21 pm

pippuzzo wrote:Hi,

really good stuff Sam, nice one.

Anyway I did not get the mandatory point of inserting time signature and pan at the beginning of each style element.
This it is possibly your decision to have a straightforward explanation in the tutorial. Anyway I would like to inform you how I usually work out these:

Time signature: if you keep the same value for all the style elements you can put only one at the beginning of the midifile and it will be copied across the whole style during the import. If this is not the case your suggestion is the way to go.

Pan: if the pan has particular need you can put it on the track, otherwise better not having it in the track to keep the possibility of using the style setting pan available in Style Play. If you put this on the track you cannot more control it in style play, so you must have a strong reason to do so.

Duplicating all these commands for each style element it is boring so I try to avoid introducing them if not really necessary.
Anyway I would like to hear your comments about, maybe I'm missing something and therefore having room to improve.

Cheers.

Hi pippuzzo,
Good questions!

When I import the midi (that was just exported from protools) i don't do any further editing for (Pan,program changes and expression) because it takes a lot longer to do those on the keyboard itself. I'm a ProTools power user, so I know all the shortcuts and stuff that i couldn't use in these videos. It would just make things complicated for those who are not familiar with this software. It would've also turned it into a ProTools tutorial pretty much.

Now back to your comments:

Time Signature:
You're right. If you don't need to program multiple time signatures, then you don't need to insert a TS for every element. I don't know if you noticed I mentioned that if there's a TS missing, it will automatically default to whatever the TS is in the header. If that's the TS you wanted then it's all good, but if you had something different in mind, then you have to go back to the software, edit and export it one more time. I call it mandotary in a sense that once a style is recorded/imported, you can no longer edit the TS anymore. For the same reason, if you export a style as a midi file, and import it in your DAW, you'll see that every element has a time signature assigned to its marker. In my opinion it's just a good habit to have regardless.

Pan and Expression:
I've tried this on multiple softwares and I noticed you can get random results for Pan and Expression.

For one thing, when you export any midi track, every single track will have at least one expression and pan value. There's nothing you can do about this. Generally their default setting is 127 for expression and 0 (center) for Pan. (For many softwares this can be changed in the preference), so that's one thing to check in case if you're not working on your own computer.

Another thing to consider:
For example, in ProTools, if you want the expression for ACC5 to be 120 across all elements, then you would think just setting it at the begining to 120 should be enough for the rest of the markers, right? That's not how it works for some sequencers though. If you import the midi you'll notice that only one marker has the correct expression and the rest of elements are all set to 100. So then, you have to edit them all one by one which kind of defeats the purpose of working in an external sequencer.

The same goes for the program changes. If a marker doesnt' have a program change assigned to it, you'll end up with a piano or something if you used certain sequencers. All in all, I think it's just better to spend that extra 30 seconds and set everything the way it should be. Then, you don't have to worry about which sequencer or whose computer you're working with.

you said:

Pan: if the pan has particular need you can put it on the track, otherwise better not having it in the track to keep the possibility of using the style setting pan available in Style Play. If you put this on the track you cannot more control it in style play, so you must have a strong reason to do so.

I'm not quiet sure how you're going to manage to mess with the pan setting in style mode especially if you're playing live and you need to move from style to style? When I create a style, I exactly know why and where should an instrument/track be panned. It's not something that most people would want to change in real time. I mean if I want my L guitar to sit at -30 and R guitar at +30, why not just save the panning info? That's a strong reason, isn't?

I totally agree with keeping the file clean though. I even wrote something about it. I always delete duplicate and additional information that do not serve a purpose within the same element.

I don't know if i was able to answer your questions.

Sam CA · Post by **Sam CA** » Wed Oct 17, 2012 2:59 pm

Some "Guitar Mode" tutorials:

Programming a Guitar track (Guitar mode) from an "External Sequencer":

www.youtube.com/watch?v=COhaKbA0En0#ws

Creating Guitar Mode chord progression in an external sequencer :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lR94hh-03o

alfredokiwi · Post by **alfredokiwi** » Wed Oct 17, 2012 3:46 pm

I saw the last video, very helpful and easy to understand. Pa500 arranger supports guitar mode and the best samples are the guitars. This mode allows any keyboardist to emulate guitar sounds and effects without to be a guitarist !!!.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=COhaKbA0En0#ws

Also I,m very happy with the sound quality of my Pa500 not only guitars, yesterday I can´t stop playing the blues scale !!! (I need to learn music fast !!!)

<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=htt ... "></iframe>

Again thanks for sharing it !!!

alfredokiwi · Post by **alfredokiwi** » Wed Oct 17, 2012 5:06 pm

We are talking about Pa arrangers guitar mode and I have recorded a demo track about Pa500 guitars mode sound quality. Is the "Unplugged Gtr 2" style that I use on this demo. One question that I have is to know when changing the level of each instrument if this should be saved on the patch immediatelly or if there is a way to memorize it on the fly because after changing STS it goes back to factory levels.

<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=htt ... "></iframe>

Anyway I´m very happy about the quality of Pa500 sounds.

pippuzzo · Post by **pippuzzo** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 7:41 am

Hi,

I'm trying to reply to Sam questions:

everything seems agreed about TS, no problem.

Pan: I usually avoid to put it on tracks. If a single setting works fine (so one fits for the whole style - my 95% of cases around) I do this in the Style Setting of Style Play mode. This has the advantage that one setting fits all and it can be easily changed later on just re-saving the Style settings (changing one event in each chord variation track takes a lot more time). If the pan need changes along the style than the only way to do this it is putting the cc in tracks for sure.

Expression: I usually prepare the SMF w/markers with the starting value only and use mostly the dynamics (say note velocity) to fit any different element. After the import I use the copy function in Style Record to easily copy all the settings in all the tracks/elements with a single shot.

Program Change: I try to keep always the same track sound across the whole style. This is especially true when using insert fx, but may be I found same rare occasions where it was mandatory to change it. Also in this case I use to create the SMF w/markers with starting value and copying it using the copy function in Style Record.

Ok, this it is my workflow. As you can see I react in different way for different messages, so haven't the same rule for everything, but this is what I found more convenient for me. I found also the copy function more reliable of putting events at the beginning of each chord variation, since a couple of times didn't worked fine to me making me loosing time to find out and adjust this.

Any comment or suggestion about is appreciated.

Cheers.

Sam CA · Post by **Sam CA** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 8:05 pm

pippuzzo wrote:Hi,

I'm trying to reply to Sam questions:

everything seems agreed about TS, no problem.

Pan: I usually avoid to put it on tracks. If a single setting works fine (so one fits for the whole style - my 95% of cases around) I do this in the Style Setting of Style Play mode. This has the advantage that one setting fits all and it can be easily changed later on just re-saving the Style settings (changing one event in each chord variation track takes a lot more time). If the pan need changes along the style than the only way to do this it is putting the cc in tracks for sure.

Expression: I usually prepare the SMF w/markers with the starting value only and use mostly the dynamics (say note velocity) to fit any different element. After the import I use the copy function in Style Record to easily copy all the settings in all the tracks/elements with a single shot.

Program Change: I try to keep always the same track sound across the whole style. This is especially true when using insert fx, but may be I found same rare occasions where it was mandatory to change it. Also in this case I use to create the SMF w/markers with starting value and copying it using the copy function in Style Record.

Ok, this it is my workflow. As you can see I react in different way for different messages, so haven't the same rule for everything, but this is what I found more convenient for me. I found also the copy function more reliable of putting events at the beginning of each chord variation, since a couple of times didn't worked fine to me making me loosing time to find out and adjust this.

Any comment or suggestion about is appreciated.

Cheers.

I create a lot of Song-Styles. Ideally, i would prefer to keep the same sound for the same track across the entire style, but that hardly works for those kind of styles-that is if you want to recreate the song in style format. The same goes for Expression and Panning. Generic styles are much different. There's no need to get creative a whole lot with pan and expression in particular, so copy function should work just fine. In fact i use that feature to set the key for all style elements all the time, since there's no way to do that in an external sequencer.

A combination of techniques usually works better for most people. If you're real fast in an external sequencer, then that would be the way to go. If not, then you use another method. ..etc.

The purpose of this tutorial was how to program/edit a midi file with markers in an external sequencer. If i had used mixed techniques, then that would've changed the topic to something else.

Elektroman · Post by **Elektroman** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 12:16 am

Hey Sam.
Thats an awesome tutorial mate. I've been using that system for creating and re-arranging styles in Cubase and Ableton for years. And always had people ask me how i do it, but now i can point them to the right place, your youtube tutorials where they can see exactly what goes on and how its done.

pippuzzo · Post by **pippuzzo** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 7:42 pm

Hi Sam,

I was just comparing my method with your to find out any possible improvement or better workaround.
As said in my previous post you may have found an easy method to show things, avoiding exceptions or particular cases. So I perfectly understand your decision to keep a straightforward and logical explanation.

And thanks to find some time to do these tutorial, they are a starter for the beginners and a good recap for experts. So anybody can benefit from them IMHO.

Cheers.

Elektroman · Post by **Elektroman** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 10:15 pm

pippuzzo wrote:Hi Sam,

I was just comparing my method with your to find out any possible improvement or better workaround.
As said in my previous post you may have found an easy method to show things, avoiding exceptions or particular cases. So I perfectly understand your decision to keep a straightforward and logical explanation.

And thanks to find some time to do these tutorial, they are a starter for the beginners and a good recap for experts. So anybody can benefit from them IMHO.

Cheers.

Hey Pip.
I was considering doing something like Sam did for a while now, but no point now since he has done a great job. Too long has it been since a good style manipulating tutorial on external sequencers and DAWs. But if at all any of us can help, i'd be glad to contribute in any way i can, as i'm sure would you and many others.