Yamaha 301 Manual Do Utilizador

Using 

Your Instrument with Other Devices

CVP-305/303/301 Owner’s Manual

188

Put simply, MIDI is a data transfer standard that allows 
easy and comprehensive control among electronic/digi-
tal music instruments and other devices. To get a better 
idea of what MIDI does, let’s first consider acoustic 
instruments, such as a grand piano and a classical gui-
tar. With the piano, you strike a key, and a hammer 
inside hits some strings and plays a note. With the gui-
tar, you directly pluck a string and the note sounds.
But how does a digital instrument go about playing a 
note?

As shown in the illustration above, in an electronic 
instrument the sampling note (previously recorded 
note) stored in the tone generator section (electronic 
circuit) is played based on information received from 
the keyboard.

Now, let’s examine what happens when we playback a 
recording. When you play back a music CD (for exam-
ple, a solo piano recording), you’re hearing the actual 
sound (vibration in air) of the acoustic instrument. This 
is called audio data, to distinguish it from MIDI data.

In the above example, the actual acoustic sounds of the 
pianist’s performance are captured in the recording as 
audio data, and this is recorded to CD. When you play 
back that CD on your audio system, you can hear the 
actual piano performance. The piano itself is not neces-
sary, since the recording contains the actual sounds of 
the piano, and your speakers reproduce them.

Files contained on the hard disk of a computer can be 
transferred to the instrument by first copying them to the 
storage media, then connecting/inserting the media to the 
instrument. 
Not only files created on the instrument itself but also 
Standard MIDI files and Style File-formatted Style files cre-
ated on other devices can be copied to SmartMedia card 
or a USB storage device from the hard disk of the com-
puter. Once you’ve copied the data, insert the card into 
the Card slot or connect the device to the [USB TO 
DEVICE] terminal of the instrument, and play back the 
data on the instrument.

Copying the files of the hard disk of the computer to the USB 
storage device

Computer

USB storage device

Instrument

Instrument

Computer

USB storage device

Reading files on the USB storage device from the instrument

[USB TO DEVICE] terminal

Disconnect the USB storage 
device from the computer and
connect it to the instrument

R

L

Internal amp

Playing the key board

Internal amp

Tone generator
(Electric circuit)

Recording

Playback