DanL

On the floor or on a stand is the same footprint for me. With my IEM's, they come right out of the mixer headphone jack, and I want to be able to control the volume of both the house feed to me as well as the overall volume, so having it in sight and in easy reach is important. I've also snaked/zip tied all my cables to they are set to be used with the rack to the left of the keys and about the same height as the bottom board. I used to put my 6 space on the floor and the K10 on top angled up at me, that worked very well. The 10 space was even better.

Brenner, the Vent is in stereo and has a full bypass.

I use the quik lok T stand as well for my 4 space. Sturdy enough for the rack and K10 on top when I'm not using my in ears.

I was in a local music store tonight and they had an FA06 and a VR09 stacked. The action is identical on both. (in case anyone is wondering)

A few people are mentioning issues with the EV5 on this board- is it something specific with 09? I've used an EV5 on my S70XS and now my FA08 and it works well. The pedal doesn't have a lot of throw and you have to be "gentle" with it since a small push can cover a lot of ground controller wise, but the sweep covers the full range of 0-127.

1: never had this happen on any board in 30 years of gigging. 2: strong- the sounds are all great and very tweakable. weak, but not show stopping- midi implementation as a controller. 3: you could try those pedals. There are parameters for reversing the polarity in the system setup menu if it sustains while you are not pressing it. 4: I kind of like the ivory feel. Yes, a little texture for sweaty fingers, but it's subtle.

The 61 key SK1 comes up for sale here once in a while, and I've seen one on Craigslist in the Philly area for around $1500. I agree that the extra voices, especially the piano, are not real suitable for solo playing, but I use them all the time with the blues band I'm with, and they work great in that context. Cut thru the mix and have a nice sound.

I've only done 2 gigs with it. No complaints- my own critical ear was the biggest problem, but I really think it was that stereo switch on the DI that screwed me up. I played the one demo jazz song and muted everything but the piano and stood out front to listen before the gig and it was good, just what was in my K10 was not sounding right. I've been jamming on it at home thru the K10 in an attempt to recreate the problem and once I hit that switch on the DI, the problem is gone. I did both gigs in mono and with my K10 due to the situations for each event, so I haven't gigged with it with the IEM's yet. I did run them at Floyd band rehearsal, in mono, and it was fine. I have it running in stereo now, with the mono monitor send feeding my K10 and it sounds good. Going to bring in my 2 tier stand and set up the Hammond in stereo as well and test that out! (my wife is gone for the week visiting family, so I can set up everything right in the middle of the living room)

You could also look for a used Electro. Then you have the whole Nord library at your disposal and a pretty nice organ sound. It has a much better action than the VR09 (in my opinion).

Yes- I use the monitor/fx out from my mixer to send to the house, and that send is mono.

Why can one not go into a music store, play a keyboard, and decide he doesn't like it? Why do you need to "get used to" a sub par keyboard feel, and not buy one that actually feels good from the get go? I played on a VR09 for an hour. I gave it a good workout. The bottom line is I couldn't connect with the keyboard feel itself. The sound engine part is fine as far as a budget board goes, but the keybed crossed it off of the "maybe I want this" list. The same reason I didn't even power up the Korg Krome 88 key board, it felt so bad just plunking a few keys for 10 seconds, that I knew I'd never like it, no matter how good the sounds might be. I'll still stand by my original statement. If you had to choose between a VR09 and a VK8 to learn to play organ, I'd take the VK8 every day of the week. You are comparing an entry level board and what is/was Roland's pro level organ. This isn't hating on the VR09 like some people seem to think. The VR is what it is- an entry level swiss army knife board. While it brings some nice features to the table, it also cuts corners in areas that are important a lot of potential buyers.

If I were learning how to play organ on a budget, I'd look for an old Hammond spinet like an L100. Otherwise, if that VK8 is cheaper than a VR09, I'd grab the VK. Yeah, it's 12 years old, but a lot of guys still use them. I saw a blues trio the other night, the organ player used a VK8, split so he could play left hand bass. It sounded pretty good running straight into the PA. Definitely passable for what he was doing and for Jazzwee, it'd be a great budget board to learn how a tonewheel organ works.

I think the TFX would be useful if you are producing tracks entirely within the FA, and then will export it as audio. I'm pretty sure most of the TFX effects are available as an IFX for an individual tone inside of a studio set. On another note- I figured out my pinched/honky piano issue. My DI is a stereo box. It has a switch on it to change it to mono, which I'm guessing sums the 2 inputs to 1 output. That switch was set to mono. I moved it to stereo, and it cleaned it up a lot. I have my left/mono out feeding 1 side of the DI, which then plugs into my K10 via XLR, and my monitor send that goes to the house uses the 2nd side of the DI, for a balanced output to the house PA. Since the keyboards are running to both the main and monitor send, there must have been some kind of phase cancellation going on between the channels when the DI was in the mono mode. Now, even if I take stereo ins from the FA, and run in mono via the monitor send, it sounds fine. So for now, I'm going to run everything in stereo to my mixer, so when I use my IEM's I can get that nice spread out sound. The monitor out will feed the house and I'm confident the piano sounds good that way.

Are you using the leslie as a MFX on the studio set? You'd need to use it as an insert effect on the organ only.

I'm finding mono doesn't do the piano much justice. I played thru my K10 last night as we were in a small place so nothing in the PA for me to get in my in ears. The gorgeous stereo piano sound that I have thru my IEM's (and even my cheap studio monitors) was pinched and nasal sounding. Between sets I grabbed the SN mono grand and tweaked it some, it was better, but I need to work this out, because one of the features I like the most about the board is really compromised running in mono. I can run stereo into my rack mixer when I use my IEM's, but I'm not sure it'd sound using a mono send from the monitor out to the house.

ok cool. I'm not going to install it today as I have a gig tonight, but over the weekend I'll do it.

that's not on the Hammondusa site yet. I wonder what the actual improvement is?

I added you, pending admin approval.

Tony, there is an FA group on Facebook and a guy there supposedly has SLM working via the camera kit. Not sure if he's changing studio sets or patches within studio sets. For me, the numeric pad mode works like a charm. I used it live last weekend and the only thing I forgot to do was hit Go a couple times. I like being able to stage the next sound and then just hit enter to execute it at the end of a song. I've programmed the expression pedal to bring layers in and out. Even multiple background pads is easy to do that way. You can also change the pad mode during a song, even if a sample is playing, and go to your zone in/out setting. A couple extra button presses but entirely easy enough to do.

MorayM, could be. It's easy enough to work around- but no where in any of the documentation does it say this. Would have saved me a good bit of troubleshooting time. Just like some of the other little things about this board, once you get it figured out, it's easy, but actually figuring it out sometimes takes a little investigation.

I started playing with sequencer mode last night, working on On The Run. I step recorded the sequence on track 1. Couldn't get it to trigger my Moog for the life of me. Made sure the song utility mode was set to only trigger external. Made sure the midi channel on the track was set correctly. I could play the Moog from the FA keyboard, but the sequencer wouldn't trigger it. What I finally found out is the sequencer doesn't care what channel you have things set to- it only transmits on the midi channel that corresponds to the track number. Track 1 transmits midi channel 1, 2 transmits 2, etc. I have my Moog on ch 16. Once I copied the sequence to track 16, it worked. The other problem, which is the Hammond's lack of software midi thru capability, is I had to introduce a midi patch bay into the equation to be able to rout the midi note data to the Moog. Normally I connect the FA out to the Hammond in, then the Hammond out to the Moog. Patch change from the FA calls the Hammond patch, which in turn has external zones/midi set up with the Moog patch change programmed into the Hammond patch. With no midi thru, there is no way to trigger the notes from the FA to the Moog. Maybe Hammond can address this in a future software update and provide a soft thru option when setting up the external zones/midi config. I did find 1 of the preset midi settings in the Hammond that did pass the data thru to the Moog, but it also triggered the upper manual organ sound, and there was no way to turn that off except to push in the drawbars. Not really a good solution. The patch bay resolves the issue, but at the expense of more gear to hook up, and potentially problematic changing of midi routing in the middle of a song to set up the sequence/Moog link. We'll see how it goes.

Sure, but be aware this is probably not the final version, I need to gig it some first. I want something that cuts in the mix but also has a good solo character. It's definitely bright sounding. A lot will depend on the overall keyboard velocity setting you prefer too. I have mine set to light with an offset of 9 to push it towards the medium setting. It takes away from some of the softer sounds but it doesn't require you to bang on it real hard to get a good bright sound. main wave is concert grand 001 string res and key off 64 hammer noise +1 stereo width 63 nuance type 3 tone character -2 mfx reverb send is 34 studio set reverb is a hall 3, send set to 80 everything else I believe is stock.

I don't think it's too much to expect, and hopefully it's something Roland can implement in a software update at some point.

I use the FA as the master controller to send patch changes to my Hammond SK1 and Moog LP. The FA has all the splits/layers that I created for each song we do. It handles all the piano/EP/synth work. The Hammond does organ and the Moog does, well, Moog. I use the FA to play sounds from the Hammond on certain songs but for the most part each board is independent, just receiving patch changes from the FA. So for example, when I pull up the studio set for Shine on You Crazy Diamond, it calls the FA sound layer that is a couple string pad/synth string sounds layered together, with a vibraphone sound split off onto the top octave or so of the board for some bell things that go on in the song. The FA sends a patch change to the Hammond which calls up the appropriate organ sound, and in turn the Hammond sends a patch change to the Moog to call up the lead sound used in the song. It takes a little while to get everything talking but once that's set up, it's easy. I have all the sound effects I need loaded up into 1 song, and can trigger the samples from the pads. I plan on using the FA sequencer as well, for On the Run, to trigger the Moog, samples, and some on board sounds. I'm also going to sequence Welcome to the Machine to get all the sound effects going at the right time on that one. On the list for the future are some songs that have a lot of orchestral components- Bring the Boys Back Home and The Trial, and I'll probably sequence all of that as well.

I got to use my FA08 for the 1st time in a live setting last night, at rehearsal for my Floyd tribute band. It sounded great, the patches cut thru the mix nicely. The EP's in particular are pretty outstanding in that context. The band was raving about how good it sounded. Saturday will be it's 1st gig test with my party band.