Availability of shared NWCITREES

Topic: Availability of shared NWCITREES (Read 3480 times) previous topic - next topic

Availability of shared NWCITREES

2013-08-21 06:02 pm

I've put this in the general Discussion Area as the "Itrees" thread seems a bit neglected recently.
I know NWC is primarily for notation, but I find it so nice I try to use it as a sequencer.
I've just acquired a Yamaha S900, and have been trying to write a custom nwcitree for it.
I'm doing it in instalments, piano, then guitar etc, but I'm already finding that some of the voices I've carefully coded fail to produce the correct sound, and as there are over 600 sounds available, I don't want to carry on making the mistakes I've made so far.
I'm puzzled as to why there are so few itrees available in the Scriptorium.
Surely whenever some user creates one, this is the obvious place to share it?
HAS ANYONE GOT A WORKING ITREE FOR A YAMAHA S900 or similar.

I must add my thanks to all those who have posted their itrees. They're an invaluable guide for an itree novice. THANK YOU ALL.

Re: Availability of shared NWCITREES

Reply #1 – 2013-08-22 08:10 am

Well: the PSR S900 is an arranger keyboard and supports all the General MIDI (GM1 or simply GM) voices; for that the default itree is ok.

Then that keyboard implements the XG (Yamaha) extensions. If you want to exploit all the other voices available with that extension you can use the XG itree available in the "instrument trees" section of this forum.
N.B. I don't know if that itree includes the whole XG standard and/or all the XG revisions.

For completeness: there is another standard, the GS (Roland) one, that should not be useful for you.

A mix of those standards has since many years now become the official General MIDI 2 (GM2).
Someone told me it's very similar to GS.
I don't know if your keyboard is GM2 compliant.

Then there are many instruments that, because they are old (pre-GM1) or special (analog synth, samplers...), should have their own itree, useful only for those that use that specific instrument.

Be careful: if you want to distribute your scores it's far better if you stick to GM1 or GM2 (or at most, with caution, GS or XG), otherwise only people that play them on the same instrument you used can hear them as you intended.

Re: Availability of shared NWCITREES

Reply #2 – 2013-08-26 07:30 pm

Thanks for that substantial reply.
I'll get it one day soon, but I'm still not clear whether using an "XG" itree will access all the sounds on the S900, or at least all the sounds I actually use! Still, bless you for trying to explain.
Thanks again,
Spike

Re: Availability of shared NWCITREES

Reply #3 – 2013-08-27 12:19 am

Spike,
the itrees are simply text files.

There is no reason you can't modify/create one to suit yourself.

Re: Availability of shared NWCITREES

Reply #4 – 2013-08-27 07:12 am

Still another detail that maybe is unclear.

You always have access to all your keyboard voices from NWC (except if the keyboard must be explicitly put in GM/GM2/XG/GS mode through SysEx commands, but that is not your case), no matter which itree is selected.
The itree simply lets you access the voice you need by choosing from a human-readable list instead of inserting manually the voice codes (bank and patch numbers).

If you really need to, as Lawrie said, you can always edit an itree file to suit your needs.
I strongly suggest to start from the XG one because of the huge number of voices it already contains.

N.B. GM is a proper subset of GM2, XG and GS.