Dave Weiser

I totally hear you man. But in hardware land, bigger vs smaller samples is one thing that separates products like Kronos from the Krome, and the Montage from the MOX. It's a standard thing. Not saying I like it, it's just how it is. You wouldn't need the K27 samples in the Forte, as they are just scaled back versions of Forte samples. Making them available for PC4 would undermine the reasons for wanting to buy a K27. Of course I would love to be able to load bigger versions of the samples into my PC4, but people in Hell want ice water too, as they say. Hopefully, the K27's samples will sound a bit better than PC4, but maybe not quite as snazzy as the Forte's. Looking forward to finding out!

Blues Monster Sighted in Haverhill, MA! I discovered recently that I've got a bona fide wunderkind living a few doors down from me - Veronica Lewis. She plays several of my favorite styles of blues piano, far better than me, AND her singing could make a bishop kick hole in a stained glass window. She just released a new album that debuted at #2 on the Billboard Blues charts and #1 on iTunes in the Blues category. And oh yeah - she's 17. An alum of the Pinetop Perkins Foundation Master Class, she's got her sh*t so much more together than I did at 17, it makes my head spin. Her knowledge of and appreciation for everything that came before her is both impressive and reassuring to an aging hack like myself. Once again, I find myself being absolutely blown away by the amazing things young people are doing with music these days! https://www.facebook.com/560975634104076/videos/482580596099434 https://www.veronicalewis.com

Sorry to say, Kurz ROM samples cannot be transferred, imported or moved in any way. I'm excited about the K2700, though I wanted to swan dive into a wood-chipper when I saw the unfortunate, confusing name. But that's OK, it's a great product. I think of it as a "PC5". And I mean that as a good thing - it's a nice step up from the already very capable PC4 - some more/bigger samples, better action, ribbon, pads and audio interface built in. I'm usually not a big user of drum pads, but holy sh*t Kurz has gotten some really good results with pads, starting with the PC3LE. The ones on the K27 feel great - I Haven't used them on a K27 itself, but I have used them on past prototypes that I'm not allowed to discuss. I think of the Forte, with its larger sample memory but smaller feature set and preset list, as sitting somewhere in the product line similar to where Yamaha's CP1 would sit, if the CP1 had received an OS upgrade that opened up full sound/FX editing.

Behringer pedals for our little rock star, Vanilla Pudge, and his trusty 3-string: Vintage Tube Overdrive, Vintage Delay and Hell-Babe wah. I think the little ones were like $30 and the wah was $50? https://www.facebook.com/david.weiser.73/posts/10221091180081541

Bootsy Collins with Bernie Worrell at the Paradise in Boston, must have been 1993? P-Funk at Lupo's in Providence, around the same year - they played from 9pm to 2am nonstop, just swapped in different players over the course of the evening so everyone could get a break. I got drunk, sobered up, got drunk again, had at least two meals, and smoked a bushel of weed. This one had it all - I laughed, I cried! Thunderbirds - Dr. John - Buddy Guy - B.B. King at the Mann Music Center outside of Philly in 1991. Buddy stole the show! Marcel Marceau, 1984, at age 12 in Reading PA. There was a technical snafu, so we actually got to hear him speak as he told us they'd be doing that last bit over again.

Thought you guys would get a kick out of this... https://retroaktivsynthesizers.com/collections/controllers/products/copy-of-mpg-8x-super-jupiter-programmer-pre-order A buddy of mine just released this bad boy! Transforms a great-sounding but hard-to-program box into a tweaker's delight!! (I have no affiliation or work ties with the company, just think it's a really badass gadget.)

Oh sh*t that is sexy.

Thanks so much guys! Putting this project together was a total blast, a welcome silver lining to an otherwise bizarre year. Got to play with some amazing cats who were kind enough to help out with the songs. Used my Forte for the piano and B3, and took my Matrixbrute for a spin on the solo. The audiobook underscore features a mix of Vienna, Spitfire and CSS libraries, composed by my old buddy Mike Raffa, one of the lead software guys at Kurzweil and my old roommate from music school a million years ago. I thought you guys would get a kick out of this stuff! Hopefully the tunes have a tad more rock power than the other kids music we've all had to listen to over the years!

If you ever find yourself in front of a Kurzweil PC3 series board, look for the FlydDarkside/Wah program. It's got an authentic wah-type bandpass filter (meant to emulate Vox wah IIRC) assigned to the CC pedal input and modwheel (for those without a CC pedal). Some version of it should be included in the factory sounds for anything starting with the PC3 or later. On the Forte, it's the first Wurly, Vintage Amp. The button above modwheel usually enables wah on any programs that have that effect. You should be able to set this up on other platforms, hardware and software, as long as it has a bandpass that can be assigned to a CC pedal. The Vox and Crybaby wah pedals can be emulated with a bandpass filter set to around 15-18dB resonance (or more narrow than an octave if "width" is the parameter). The freq range can really vary, as artists used to tweak their pedals all over the place. I usually start with 300Hz to 2500Hz and then adjust by ear from there. Having said all this... while I make a living from designing and tweaking sounds, and I care deeply about it... most folks at a gig will be happy as long as you're playing the part on something that sounds even vaguely similar. In my experience, nailing the album sound is always something that the player enjoys more than anyone else!

Ha he loved the Elmo guitar and still rocks it occasionally! Thanks again! Happy to share my custom sounds with anyone from this forum, free of charge. Just shoot me an email. Includes stuff I've done for Broadway shows and acts like The Who and Brian Wilson. Just added my updated version of No Quarter to my PC4 set! weiserdav@gmail.com

I would just get rid of all FX on the program. The chorus/vib is not good enough to make it worth keeping. KB3 through a Vent is awesome - I was just playing that set up this afternoon, as my 5 yr old is obsessed with Deep Purple, wanted me to play along with Back Door! Now we've got the Vent hooked up to his kid-sized Loog 3-string guitar.

I would sell my mother to the Taliban to have had the chance to see Rory Gallagher live!

All I can think of is how much trouble Leslie Neilson could have gotten into with this sucker in Airplane!

KB3 is a separate sound engine, doesn't use keymaps, layers or samples the way the rest of the VAST sounds do. The Leslie is an FXchain. To change the Leslie speed you'll need to edit the FX chain, and on many of the programs you'll need to do it twice. This is because the Kurz team discovered (back when I was working there) that you could simply stick two of their Leslie effects in series, and it sounded better. Uses a ton of resources, is unwieldy to edit, and is a bit too "extreme" for some players. It's a pain, but here's what to do: Edit the program, find the FX page, select the Leslie FX chain and hit Edit. You'll now see a chain, a series of boxes, and there should be duplicates. Should look something like kb3A kb3B // kb3A kb3B. The FAST and SLOW speeds for HI AND LOW rotors are pretty easy to recognize, can remember if they're in the A or B block. But whichever one it is, edit the times in BOTH blocks. It's a total drag, but it should work. Anyone who gets stuck with this sort of stuff can feel free to shoot me an email. Also, I'm happy to share my custom PC4 set with anyone from this forum. Includes all kinds of goodies, some very useful pianos, several crazy-ass Bootsy Collins Mutron basses, more EPs (including my update No Quarter program!), a bunch of analog synths, and some stuff I've done for Broadway shows and big rock acts. weiserdav@gmail.com

I hoped you would like this! Finding the clean solution is a huge priority at my day job, programming for theater shows, where a keyboard catastrophe means I'll be back to waiting tables! Here's a quick clip of our rigs in action, this time at Les Miserables in Mexico City (final rehearsal before moving to the pit). https://www.facebook.com/487177778030039/videos/1639352076145931 During non-COVID times, we've got close to a hundred of these rigs in use around the world at any given time, with Boss FV500L and/or Roland EV5 pedals, with a pile of fresh spares nearby, ready to deploy in a pinch. We use the single pedal controlling two keyboards on School of Rock, but I don't have any clips from that show. Let us know how it goes!

This is a good puzzle! I just re-read your post and saw that you said you never play both instruments at once... In that case this is a no brainer - this kind of scenario is why God gave MIDI to mankind, along with fire and beer. Get an expression pedal and connect it to the Kronos, then connect Kronos MIDI out to CX MIDI in, and that should pretty much do the trick. Simple and elegant, with the least amount of moving parts. You'll just need to make sure that whatever you're playing on the Kronos is set to LOCAL, so you're not transmitting notes to the CX. Plenty of ways to deal with this depending on how flexible the Kronos MIDI implementation is. (I assume it must be comprehensive and pretty rockin'.) In a pinch, you could even just turn down the CX volume knob when it's not being played! Any variation on this approach is going to be easier to implement and MUCH easier to troubleshoot if something goes wrong, than going with the audio volume pedal approach.

Hi KC friends! It's been a while - and instead of replies about Kurzweils and keymaps, I've got some original music to share! Once the music theater world got crushed by covid, I kept myself busy for most of the year with a side project, a music-themed children's book that I wrote for my son. I enlisted a few music industry friends to help me bang out a pair of companion rock songs, thought you guys might get a kick out of 'em.

The guy who runs it (Kurz R&D's software manager, Fran) posted on Facebook a few days ago that it's down for a much needed overhaul. Said it could take a few weeks, but had to be done.

I believe it's a hardware limitation, it's part of the hardware spec. A different memory spec in this case would mean a different product. Bummer it can't quite do the whole Purgatory collection, but I think you'd only be losing one instrument. I'm curious if anyone has tried to load the whole thing? Sometimes a spec like "2GB" could be slightly over - if it were 2.2 I think the Purgatory stuff would fit.

That's where I worked for 13 years! Got out for good behavior. It's in Waltham, where I lived until moving up to Haverhill last year. It's technically called YCRDI - Young Chang Research & Development Institute. When we would get asked all kinds of crazy requests from the sales guys and HQ we would joke that it stood for "You Can't Really Do It". I no longer work there, and the guys are absolutely swamped with work, so not sure if I could swing a tour. I do a have a nice selection of Kurz boards in my studio here, including a prototype VA-1 that works! https://www.facebook.com/david.weiser.73/videos/10218594162097652/ Come by anytime (when the world is done blowing up)!

PC4 and SP6 both have 'em, and they also have slammin' good balanced outputs. Rare to see either of those items in that price range ($1995 and $1495). The Forte's converters and analog outs are damned good though - I'll eat a bug if anyone can distinguish between PC4's and the Forte's DACs.

I've got some much better ones, free of charge. Hit me up anytime. weiserdav@gmail.com At least a few forumites here know 'em and use 'em.

Hey Moody hope you're well man! When I was at Kurz we used "LE" to mean "light edition". That's what the board is. If anything said "limited" it was against the wishes of the design team. (Not that this would necessarily rule it out from happening!) Unless the price is insanely low, I would skip it the LE. It's over 10 years old now. Hipogrito is Kurz's head of software dept, and pretty much the best guy ever. They should build a statue of that guy.

Or on a Forte? They will not work on an Artis. The synth will work on Forte with a current OS. The EPs will not work in Forte because the EP samples are different. But if you have my custom Forte set, there are already Eps in there that cover this stuff pretty well. Anyone with a Forte, PC4 or SP6 can feel free to hit me up and I'll send my custom set free of charge, the private reserve stuff that I usually give to my customers. weiserdav@gmail.com

If we weren't on lockdown I'd say come up to Haverhill for a visit and you can play mine! Once the world is done blowing up, you're welcome to drop by sometime.