erik_nie

New separation tooling from OpenVino within Audacity does a pretty good job!

No you don't. The -20db reduction is identical to lowering your volume slider. Adding DI- transformers will always impact your signal (the best ones will be 99% transparent). Improving with a DI box is not possible. Or you can use it as a effects-box that add's some distortion/warmth... Perhaps you can pad the input from your mixer, or buy a cheap balanced attenuator (like on amazon, search "20db Balanced XLR Attenuator") that has no transformer. Other solution is to buy a mixer that has balanced out: like Rolls pm351, that gives you also the option to mix you monitor/in-ear. I played for 30 years in many band/stages and never needed/owned a DI box. In bigger shows in the early days, the sound guys brings his DIs. Now most mixers are digital and have stageboxes. When the length of your cable is less than 10m (30ft), balanced is not even needed. You already have balanced out from the Kurzweil, so you are set for long cables. Why bring something extra that cost money, extra setup time and if active you need to take care of the powersupply/battery. This is in the Netherlands, where power is almost always stable and okay (Expect for once where there was 380V on the 230V line and 50% of the fuses blown of all our equipement, now we have power tester and a big set of spare fuses). And for live use. Being audible as a keyboard player with a hired soundengineer (Withi focus on drum/guitar/voice) is already a challenge... If you talk about high shows or television, buy the best DI (Radial) just to be sure. YMMV!!!

Nord Piano 5-73 with White Grand for more piano based songs and Bright Grand for most others to compete with drums and guitar.

I build my own app (see my footer). It plays an .mp3 or .wav file from iCloud. That works great and is very stable. The stereo file has click on the left and audio on the right (or swapped...) When played via a USB mixer (Like a mackie, Behringer, Key Largo) it outputs this as a stereo file to the FOH mix. Thus playing the audio on one side and click on the other. Using an stereo aux (if present), I could output this and feed it back into the mixer with a splitter cable. Then the outputs are taken up and there is no option for a FOH mix and a in-ear mix With more advanced audio-interfaces like the RME UCX, or audio4c from iConnectivity, it is possible to split the audio and click and distribute this over the FOH mix and in-ear mix with internal mixer/routing. With the RME there is an iPad app to control the mix, with the audio4c only a mac/windows app. As I use the iPad to display chords, it is not an easy step to swap apps to change the volume of the backing-track during performance. I hope there is a small, not too expensive, solution for this

Thanks for the response. I would really want to use the key largo, but this will output the click track left right into the FOH. Many devices exist like this. The trouble is to get left with audio to left+right FOH (mono) and right with click to seperate output and in ear mix. Seems like an option that many keyboard players want to use. Perhaps also drummers Perhaps there is an option in the Key Large that I missed, I read the manual to check this out. Regards, Erik

I hope someone can help me with the issues I'm having with my setup. My current setup is: - Nord Piano 3-73 - Nord Stage 3 - iPad 6 mini for sheets and playback of Backing tracks (left audio, right click) and send program changes to Nords - el-cheapo USB audio interface from china (USB stick size) - Self made Mixer (see: Mixer) I checked the audio interface against several others, sound quality is great and similar to audio out of my macbook air M1. What I want: - Single device attached to my synth, no 19-inch rack or complicated setup where I need a computer - Mix the synths - Add the audio (mono) part of the iPad backing track to the stereo output to FOH - Output Click track to FOH - USB output from iPad to both Nords to change patches from iPad - Ability to live change volume of synths and backing tracks (not always consistent in output level of patches and backing tracks) - Power the iPad via a USB-bub with power-input - Make a headphone mix with adjustable mix: - My FOH audio-mix - Click - FOH stereo return aux (for rest of band) This works with my current setup. All the boxes are ticked. I have 2 issues at the moment: - After adding the USB to both Nords, some static noise is added (not much, barely acceptable). - some balanced output would be nice (audio out, click out, aux-in) I tried different solutions: - changed USB cables. no changes - changed power-adapter (from Mixer and iPad), no change - Added an audio isolator, this solved the issue, but introduced strong crosstalk between audio and click - use seperate audio interface (tried a few, made it a little better but adds another adapter, cables, etc) - Audio4c as a full solution, this works but volumes can only be changed by attaching a computer. There is no way to use a midi-controller to change only the volume of the back-track audio), great device to have the iPad powered. With some software updates this could me a great device. But the changes this might be done on short term are pretty low Possible other solutions might be: - K-mix from Keith McMillen - Play backing-tracks from seperate device (With midi-selectable tracks because I control that from the iPad): - BlueBox from 1010 (perhaps also to play backing tracks there) - LP16 (But most people say it is not very stable) Another solution is to add a Laptop (MacBook) and a dedicated Audio interface. This will tick all the boxes, except many cables, long setups and my previous set consisted of an audio laptop where updating and backing up is a terrible thing to maintain. Using the iPad gives me a simple backup: My older iPad that I use to control the FOH MR18 There must be a simple solution for this... Any help is appreciated!!!!

At that time we had a drummer with Roland V-drums and real cymbals. So easy to do.

I see lot's of people responding from a musicians point of view. I also focus on all kinds of technical items like backingtracks, used equipement, how to solve studio stuff live, technical skills of the musicians, how they interact. Same as with my audio system at home, every plug, cable, speaker, amplifiers is checked, upgraded.... In the end the audio system of a friend (cheap, old stuff) sounded 'nicer' then my high-end set. Now I listen to music. Watching a live band is much more difficult to "just enjoy" I'm sure that the major part of the audience doesn't care and only listens/looks at the singer. In my wedding band, we play many songs, also current repertoire. That is loaded with sound effects, arpeggiators, synth layers, percussion and processed backing vocals. Sometimes these songs are played only a few gigs. Therefor in the 70+ song repertoire, I made backing tracks for around 8 songs. We tried to get it working without, but just sounded to empty. Sounds better and more professional, nobody minds. The tricky part is that everybody in the band started to ask: can you add that break, loop, solo, clap, in a backing track. I just refuse to do that. Funny story: few day before a wedding they called if we could play "viva la vida", no time to rehearse. I played a karaoke version and de singer nailed it. We all faked on stage. Didn't feel right, but we were asked to play it again as an encore...

I need to mix my two boards and backingtracks for FoH and my Headphone. Previously I used a RME UCX interface. Also nice as high quality Audio interface. To change the mix I needed some button presses or use the totalmix app. Now I made my own interface using two cheap mixer boards from a chinese webshop. if you select the right Adapter (I have several that insert a hum), the mixer is dead silent and drives even my AKG K240 headphone. I use a two step approch: First mix the backing audio and two board. Send this to FoH. Use that same mix for the second stage to create my in-ear mix together with a stereo mix from FoH and the Click. 100% hands-on, small form factor, cheap, connectors at the right places. The amount of work is limited, the reward high! Perhaps not studio grade, but sounds great live. You could make something similar with the Macbook output

Yes, used it for some time with my own samples CFX and for playback of backingtracks I modified the original code to be more accurate for velocity, added a freeverb implementation and added stereo backingtracks using 4 channel output (backing/sample and click) The sd-card is made readonly, so there is no issue with the normal raspberry Pi risk of corrupting the sd-card. Worked very well with very little latency. The switching of samples takes some time. Never had an issue with it and was a fun project. My modified version of SampleBox My backing tracks adventure took many versions: SampleBox, inside Kurzweil Forte, Mainstage, Plogue Bidule, Android app, Pythonista app and now QSheets. Some where mono (Left Audio, Right Click), some multichannel with stereo audio for backing track audio. Mono seems to be more than good enough (we only have additional stuff like percussion, effects and riffs where I needed a third hand) I did not follow the development for the last years, good to hear that it is still active!

Yes. There are many ways to collect wav files. Some free soundfonts of SFZ files have separate wav files that you can use. If you dive into the location of the wav of some mainstage/logic instruments, you can also collect the wav files. you can also set the velocity fixed and play the notes yourself, or use a midi sequence to do this. I highly recommend using the tools from Bjorn Bojahr: https://www.bjoernbojahr.de/endlesswav.html for the looping and extraction from an audio file. After a small training video you can very quickly cut and loop all samples The Kurzweil sound consists of a keymap inside a program. Kurzfiler can detect the rootkey, but this does not always work. Make sure that you create compact keymap. This saves location-numbers in the kurzweil system als alows for more sample sets (All samples are loaded into one location with multiple offsets, compared to all samples in a new location) This works on all recent kurzweil synths. Good luck!

Yes, this is possible. Did it several times years ago to get some piano samples from my Yamaha digital piano in the Kurzweil, also many other samples. The mapping from the raw samples to a krz file is done using a small java application. https://kurzfiler.sourceforge.io/ Many settings and options, but in the end it is possible. I forget my workflow...

I'm currently using the Kz Zex 1 cheap in-ear headphones after my high-end custom-molded in-ear monitors unfortunately stopped working. The custom-molded sleeves of my previous in-ears tended to become uncomfortable after prolonged use during gigs. My band-mates have invested in high-end multi-driver in-ear monitors worth 1000+ euros. As a former audiophile, I used to constantly seek audio upgrades, but now I've shifted my focus to simply enjoying the music. Despite being budget-friendly, I must admit that the Kz Zex 1 provides me with great audio quality. It offers better instrument separation, a more pleasant sound signature, and it performs admirably well during gigs. In fact, I find the audio quality to be more than sufficient for the in-ear sound.

We have a XM-18 as FOH mixer, out bass-player with great ears does the soundcheck with a long cable using an iPad. I have the FOH stereo mix in my ears. I try to coach everyone in keep the right balans and have the iPad to compensate. we discuss the volumes of solo's, sounds and everyone tries to avoid to ride the volume fader during the night. I know the balance because we played in the same setup for years. Besides some low-end tweaking per room our mix is almost always fine in one minute (helps that we have a full digital drum kit and no sound on stage, only in-ear). During a gig I can make minor adjustments if i hear a volume issue. The fact that I can hear my keys well enough, is most likely because they are a little bit too loud. Then again I invested in my Nord gear and been busy with sound tweaking a lot... Even on big gigs, we only provide stereo to the FOH, too many bad sound-guys. They can now focus on the EQ and volume. If we know the guy and trust him, he gets the iPad. Works for us.

I can confirm that it briefly broke on my iPhone, but with the new iPad OS 16.5.1 and iOS 16.5.1 it works again on both my iPad Mini 5 and iPhone 12 mini! Scary stuff!