THE STORE BUTTON

Not necessarily. Most keyboards allow the sounds that came from the factory to be edited in various ways. You may be able to make slight alterations or even radical changes that will make the sound more useful for a particular musical situation. Changes of this type are called sound editing. The details of how sounds are edited differ from one instrument to another, so you’ll need to consult the manual for specifics. We’ll have much more to say about the creative possibilities of sound editing in future columns.

After editing a sound, you’ll quite naturally want to store the edited version in the instrument’s internal memory, so that it will be available the next time you need it. That’s where the Store button comes in. (On some instruments, it’s called the Write button or the Save button.)

You’ll need to consult your instrument’s manual for details, but the procedure generally works like this:

• Go into edit mode and make changes in the sound.
• Press the Compare button, if necessary, to compare your edits with the original version of the sound and make sure it sounds the way you want it to.
• Press the Store button.
• Select a memory location for the edited sound.
• Press “Yes” or “Okay” to confirm the Store operation.

You can change the attack or release time of the sound’s envelope. This will cause it to start or end more quickly or more slowly. A long, slow attack or release time is suitable for gentle or dreamy music, while fast attacks and releases are better for rhythmic and aggressive styles.

You can assign different effects (such as reverb or chorus) to the sound, or change the level of the effect. Effects generally make sounds richer and more interesting, but also less clear and punchy. If your song includes several sounds that all have lots of reverb, for instance, the mix may get muddy, so lowering the reverb level in individual sounds might be a good way to clean up the mix.

You can raise or lower the filter cutoff frequency, so as to make the sound brighter or darker. A filter is a device that removes some of the overtones from the sound’s frequency spectrum — it’s easy to hear, though several pages would be needed to explain the technical details. The best way to learn about the filter on your keyboard is to try a few edits and listen to the results.

You can change the speed of the low-frequency oscillator (LFO). Most often, an LFO is used for vibrato, so this edit will make the vibrato quicker or slower.

You can layer a second sound with the primary sound. For example, you might want to put a string orchestra behind a piano sound, so that when you play the keys you hear both.

You can change the way the sound responds to controller gestures. For example, you may be able to change the number of half-steps of a pitchbend depth parameter so that when you push the bender fully up or down, the sound will change by an octave instead of by a whole-step.

The sound editing features on home keyboards tend to be limited to these basic types of changes. In fact, some home keyboards don’t allow any sound editing. If you have a pro-oriented synthesizer, you’ll be able to get much deeper into the art known as sound design.

When storing your edited sound, you’ll need to think about which memory location to use. Many keyboards have a bank of 128 memory slots for user-edited sounds. When you store a new sound in a given slot, whatever is in that slot will be lost forever, so don’t choose a slot unless you’re sure you can dispense with whatever is in it.

Your keyboard may have a floppy disk drive or SmartMedia card slot for long-term storage. If so, you can make a backup copy of the current contents of the user memory, thus ensuring that you’ll be able to get back a sound that you accidentally erased. Some keyboards also have utilities for storing their memory contents on a computer. If your keyboard has user memory, it’s almost certain to have some system for long-term storage, which will give you unlimited opportunities to be creative by editing and storing sounds.