Merge vs Layer in GS & Resulting Poly

[stories777]

Help! My new GS96 manual wasn\'t crystal clear in this area:

-Why did the manual lead me to have to first merge two instruments in order to layer them?
-I set out just wanting a layer of 2 pianos.
-Did the merge of the Grail w. the Trachtman cause the Trachtman to come under the influence of the Grail\'s sympathetic resonance algorithms?? or, just side-by-side & discrete & unaffected???

-Is the resulting merged/layered instrument half the polyphony - as happens in hardware synths? Or, is it seen as one new instrument and thus 96 poly? Also, since the Grail is 24-poly under GS-96 (4-notes per note w. sympathetics), does layering it with another piano reduce total poly to 12?

-Thanks all! -Stories.

[David Govett]

\"Merge\" is just a convienient way to get two instruments from differing .gig files together into the same .gig file. At that point, you simply have two separate instruments inside a single .gig file. These could be loaded separately to MIDI channels or the whole gig could be loaded at once and both instruments would show up as loaded, using RAM and everything. They would respond to their assigned patch numbers also. Once they are merged and show up together in the editor, you can then layer them together. Layering does add to the polyphony. Layering the two pianos you mentioned would probably use 6 notes per key (4 for holy grail and 2 for the other)
Of course, there are limitations to how many \"dimensions\" you can have. Combining two instruments with too many layers or velocity splits might cause some of the splits to just dissapear if the result would exceed the limit.
Good luck
Dave