MOXF FLASH BOARD

What is very important to get clear is that a Voice is the fundamental playable entity in the MOXF. The Voice is made up of Waveforms. These are oscillators. An oscillator is a technical term for what is oscillating or vibrating in any musical instrument. The Voice is a set of parameters that describe an instrument. A trumpet is made of brass or nickel (each sounds different), is several feet in length, usually coiled (heralding trumpets are straight), three valves, etc., etc. the material it is made out of affects the tone, the bell helps direct the sound. But no matter how detailed our description of this horn it makes no sound until a vibrating pair of human lips are placed against the mouthpiece.

Voice parameters describe the trumpet but until you select a Waveform on the OSCILLATOR > WAVE page, the Voice makes no sound. Voice data is a small set of parameters that get stored in your USER BANKS right on board the MOXF. Only the Waveforms and the Sampled audio are installed on the Flash Board. The MOXF keeps track of your Voice data and where the audio that will allow it to sound is installed.

Every Voice points to a Waveform (or multiple Waveforms). This takes place on the following Voice mode screen:
Press [EDIT]
Press a numbered button [1]-[8] to view Element parameters
Press [F1] OSC (Oscillator)
Press [SF1] WAVE

An old school analog synth came with two Waveforms: a sawtooth and a pulse wave. The filters were used to shape the “tone” of the sound by emphasizing some harmonics and filtering others. Your MOXF comes with 3,977 Waveforms to start with, and you can add 2,048 new Waveform to your Flash Board.

Fact: A Waveform is a collection of Samples.
Fact: You cannot load Samples without loading the Waveform.

We’ll come back to this. A single sample could be a dot wave (.wav) this is a file format that can be played by many different devices: computers, handheld recorders, handheld playback devices, etc. Once you put it in your MOXF it is placed in what Yamaha calls a “Waveform”. Here it is enhanced with additional parameters that allows the MOXF to address it. It is assigned a KEY on the Musical keyboard, C-2 thru G8. This key assignment can be to a single key or a range of keys, each key in the range is 1/12th of an octave from the next key. The MOXF will speed up and slow down playbackof the audio to precisely reproduce these pitch changes. The sample is assigned a velocity range, 1-127, so that the KEY can determine the volume dynamically in response to your performing gestures on the keyboard. Oh, and by the way, it has 128 audio channels with which to playback this audio.

These additional parameters (and there are a few more) are added to the .wav and now make up the entity Yamaha refers to as a Waveform. These parameters are meaningless to your computer, or other playback devices. So technically, although the sample started as a .wav, it is now much, much more than that.

For a sample to be addressed by the MOXF synthesizer it must be placed in a Waveform.

A Waveform can have as few as one, and as many as 128 samples in it.

Fact: As many as 8 Waveforms can be used in a MOXF Normal Voice
Fact: As many as 73 Waveforms can be used in a MOXF Drum Kit Voice

You can see a list of your installed Waveforms by going to [FILE] and pressing [F6] FLASH > [SF2] DELETE

LOAD OPTIONS
When you highlight a File that the MOXF recognizes, you may find an offer to Load:

x_"with Waveform”
x_ “with Sample”

If you clear the “x” next to “with Waveform” notice the “with Sample” options disappears. This is because of what you just learned, a Sample must always be addressed by the additional set of parameters that organize how it will playback, the “Waveform”.

A sample on your Flash Board without a set of instructions as to how to use it, would be just taking up space.

The Waveform is a small set of data. Measured in the Kilobyte range. Certainly less than 2kb
The actual audio, the individual sample, could be huge in size, by comparison. A single sample can be as large as 64MB.

Appreciate the difference in size. Use dollars to make it clear. Two thousand dollars that represents the Waveform, versus the hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars that would be the Sample itself.

Anyway you can never load a Sample without a Waveform. The Waveform is the synth engine addressing the .wav

When loading Voices into your MOXF:
Fact: You can opt to load the Waveforms either with or without the Samples.
Fact: You can opt to load the Voices, and load neither Waveforms nor Samples.

Here’s why:
Say you load Library 1, say it is 128MB of data for this example, and includes a Bank of 128 Voices. You install 128 MB of data to your Flash Board, and load the Voices that use this data to USER 1 Bank.
Now you obtain Library 2, also 128MB and 1 Bank of Voices. You install this new set of 128MB of data, and using the Load TYPE = “1Bank Voice”, you direct its 128 Voices to your USER 2 Bank.

When you redirect the Bank to User 2, the MOXF automatically, documents where the Voices go, where the audio data is installed and it updates every Voice to repoint it to its audio data. By loading a second library, the Waveforms are added to the lowest numbered empty Waveform location (there are 2048 total Waveform slots). Nothing on your Flash Board is ever overwritten by the LOAD process. New Waveforms are added to the end of the Waveform list. A new “catalog” is created internally.

Now you must immediately create a backup file that documents your new catalog. You would SAVE a FILE and make sure you opt to Save it “with Samples”. This backup file has all your newly updated data, including the new Voices you added that now point their own data. We’ll call this the “MainSet”

If you load an All data file, a library that does not contain samples, you will naturally overwrite the Voices in the USER 1, 2, and 3. This does not, however, affect your Waveforms, nor your Samples. If you later want to reload your “MainSet” back in…
Your Waveforms and Samples are all there, already.

This is when you would opt to Load without making changes to your Flash Board. So you would clear the “with Waveform” box. This would Load your Voices back in without changing anything concerning you Flash Board.

If ever you take your FLASH BOARD out of your MOXF, say to go to friend’s place or to a church that also has a MOXF… Think about it for a minute…

Your Samples are already on the Flash Board. So you don’t have to wait 20-40 minutes it would take to load your data. Simple pop the Board into the new MOXF… Load up the Voices

Load your “MainSet” “with Waveform” but clear the box that says “with Samples”
The smaller Waveform data loads lickety split, the larger Samples are already in place. So in seconds, not minutes, you are making music with your custom set.

Hope that helps.