Adjusting the pitch of my Yamaha Motif rack XS

Hi,

I recently acquired a new flute - which is "high pitch", 452.  I'd like to be able to adjust the pitch of my Motif Rack XS to play in tune with it.  I know of some work-arounds, such as recording the midi in an audio file, and shifting the pitch of the audio file - but that seems pretty archaic, and not likely to give me a very good sound.  Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Dave Harris

Chappel,

Thanks for your quick reply.  You've done some serious digging to help me out, and I do appreciate it. 

I use a number, actually several thousand, midi files as backups for songs I play.  I've set all of my files to provide a GM sys.ex command to put the Motif Rack into GM, as this plays well with all of the files, unless it is a file I've edited with Sonar, myself, where I can assign Motif specific instruments.

What I'm hoping I can get is a precise way to shift the pitch of the all the instruments from inside the midi file.  I change flutes all the time, and would rather not have to fire up the Motif editor repeatedly.  If I can include a sys.ex command after the GM command, or can add something to the event list at the front end of each backup track, then I can have two versions of each song - one at 452, and one at 440, which lets me switch very easily.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the PRV lets me draw a pitch bend in, and it might be hard to get precise consistency across files.  But, I've not used it so I can't say.

Thanks,
Dave

Hi,

RTFM!!!!!!

Yes.  Yet another case of my jumping before looking.  It's there - there is global tuning.  It's not hard to get to - Utility -> Global -> tuning, by cents. 

Somehow, it did seem quite strange that a Motif Rack XS wouldn't have this, and it does.

But, still, I would like to know how to the the Midi *.sys file for it.  But, after spending about 10 hours on the net reading about it, and then figuring out that my Yamaha likely does not do "standard" midi programming, but, rather, "extended" XG compatible programming, and then having to translate pitches into cents into two sets of pairs of Hexadecimal numbers .....  Aaaargh!!  Who thought this up, anyway - it's the revenge of the computer geeks. (and, I'm not too bad at programming, being facile in Fortran, and having built my own computers from scratch from time to time).

Anyway, just push a couple of buttons, twist a knob - and presto chango.

But, it was really weird - playing at 452 just feels and sounds so WRONG, even though my tuner (adjustable) said it was right, and clearly the midi was in the same pitch.

Dave

Well, it's harder to find, because they call it "micro tuning".  I found it by searching for "tuning".

But, all is well that ends well, and I am enjoying my hi-pitch flute quite a bit.

Dave