The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 06, 1994
Filed:
Jul. 08, 1993
Hideo Yamada, Hamamatsu, JP;
Yamaha Corporation, , JP;
Abstract
A musical tone generating apparatus, to be applied to an electronic musical instrument, provides at least a plurality of channels and a tone-color memory. Each channel contains one tone generator and two or more buffers. The number of the buffers provided in a plurality of channels is set smaller than the number of tone colors stored in the tone-color memory. Each of the buffers stores one tone color, so that the tone generator creates a musical tone signal responsive to the tone color stored in the buffer in accordance with musical tone information given from an external device such as a keyboard. The tone colors to be used in a tune to be performed can be freely assigned to the buffers in advance. Herein, all of the buffers are classified into two or more groups in accordance with a buffer-grouping priority, so that in a plurality of channels, when a musical-tone generation is assigned to a channel, one buffer given a higher priority is selected prior to another buffer. In a case where an automatic performance is played based on musical tone information read from a memory, the tone-color assignment to the buffers is determined responsive to a maximum number of the musical tones to be simultaneously produced with respect to each of the tone colors corresponding to the musical tone information. When a new musical-tone generation is designated, one of the channels is automatically selected in accordance with the buffer-grouping priority.