For some reason, I’ve totally overlooked Yamaha’s Studio Connections until now. Being a fairly heavy weight Cubase user, you’d think I would have come across it before, perhaps discussed at cubase.net or nuendo.com. Or perhaps mensioned on other forums. But it seems that Studio Connections is a dark secret. Very few people even seem to know what it does.

I’ve been exploring the “Recall” side of things, which is essentially a sysex librarian. It’s easy to see why nobody understands this because Yamaha’s website doesn’t even mension the word sysex.

What happens is, the Studio Manager (pictured above) allows you to request sysex dumps from your external gear, and stores it until you next want to send that back. This is integrated into Cubase, so you can store sysex dumps within a Cubase song file. There is a standalone version for non-Cubendo users too. The great news is that it genuinely seems to work and it’s a more elegant solution than recording sysex dumps at the beginning of your song.

It’s pretty easy, if you know a little about sysex, to come up with working templates (they’re called GTRC templates – Generic Total Recall Component!). In a week or so I’ve written templates for the Evolver, Korg Karma and Eventide Eclipse. Plus I’m using the excellent Kurzweil K2600 template made by Jason. I’ll put these online soon.