YAMAHA R&D


Simon Inkley, one of Yamaha’s elite R&D team developing the next generation of digital keyboards, gives a behind-the-scenes peek at the development of keyboard ‘voices’


Behind the Voices in our Instruments


equipment. Here I want to give you a guided tour around the work that our team does in developing the instrumental sounds, or ‘Voices’, inside our digital keyboard instruments.


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Planning and sampling Information – from global customer market research, music industry specialists, sound engineers, software engineers, hardware technicians and marketing experts – helps us decide which Voices should be created next. We then begin detailed research into all aspects of the original instrument to determine how we can


amaha’s research and development teams drive innovation and excellence across the full range of instruments and


best record the original instrument’s sound (known as sampling). We list all the tones and playing styles we want to capture, and the ideal combination of equipment we’ll need to do it. We source the best examples of the instruments, hire great musicians to play them, then plan a sampling session in the most acoustically suitable environment. Yamaha engineers first set up microphones to ensure the instrument can be recorded at the highest possible quality and resolution, then record each individual note in the instrument’s range many times and at different velocities and volumes. This enables us to create Voices that contain velocity ‘switch points’. For example, the ‘Sweet! Flute’ Voice (featured in many Yamaha keyboards) has a very clear


switch point between the blown and overblown flute sound. In order to create a realistic representation of the instrument as a keyboard Voice, we need to sample many different playing styles from the instrument. For example, a guitarist may play open, dead, muted, hammer-on, etc, whilst also creating fret and strumming noise and guitar body taps. During recording, audio specialists monitor the sound quality intently as the musician plays each note. The sampling session produces a long multi-track recording which contains all of the audio captured by each microphone during the session. An audio engineer then separates, trims and labels each recorded note and playing style to produce thousands of individually tagged audio files. These


Photo: © Yamaha


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