Spider76

With my band we use the big (relatively speaking) brother CQ20B. It has more inputs and channels but lacks the screen, which for my use case it's actually a positive. We'll use a tablet anyway (and our phones for personal monitor mix), so why waste money and space on a screen that will never gat used? Absolutely amazing piece of gear. It's so tiny it looks like a toy, but punches far above its weight

Yes, sadly it's a matter of fact that most high-end pianos are not sold as instruments, but as furniture for millionaires in Beverly Hills and Dubai. Like most Ferraris and Lamborghinis are not bought to ever be driven, etc. From this perspective, I can understand the success of the Spirio system (which is perplexing to us from our musician's point of view). And I must say that it kinda makes me happy: it means that even if nobody will ever play them, those pianos will hopefully make some music, instead of being just left there as an expensive piece of interior design to show off.

They really REALLY couldn't make it uglier, didn't they? Hope that off-white with weird cuts in the wooden corners is just a prototype...

Exactly. The whole fuss of manufacturers to provide the best possible stereo samples is only a bonus for the player, to better recreate the experience of sitting at a real piano. But for the audience, it actually makes the sound worse.

Isn't that just a Korg C1 with a new piano sample and a fancier wooden case? I does look good though, it will make a nice piece of furniture in any living room.

Which inevitably leads us to...

Exactly. As usual in these kind of threads, in a few pages every keyboard ever produced will be mentioned, but the truly iconic ones are just a very selected few: the ones with a striking, distinctive look, seen everywhere onstage and in videos, and maybe even recognizable by non-keyboard players (though this last criteria is not really important). Microkorg surely is at the very top of the list together with Hammond, Rhodes, Vox, Minimoog, Prophet, Juno, Jupiter, Mellotron...and of course the most iconic of them all: a big black shiny grand piano (the brand is totally irrelevant, nobody knows of Steinways or Yamahas or Bosendorfers outside our small circle)

And maybe he is a devote user of Juno synths 🤭

Jupiter 8's or OB8's were standard stuff in LA?!? How many billionaire musicians were there at the time? 😯

Great explanation, thanks so much!

This is something I never really understood. How come that the "standard" organ trio came to be Hammond+drums+guitar? To me the guitar seems totally redundant next to an organ that can easily do the same parts plus much more. Wouldn't a bass or a lead instrument (sax, trumpet etc) make more sense? Ps is it possible that nobody mentioned the Cory Henry trio yet?

As Samuel said, literally all the "stories", articles, interviews, videos... everything I found about the song said that AI only extracted John's solo voice from the mess of the demo. By now I probably read at least 30-40 reviews, news and articles and I never found any hint anywhere of supposed deepfakes. And the bootleg of John's demo has been available everywhere online for the last couple of decades, so it's just plain evident that it it is his song and his voice. Let's just enjoy one last Lennon-McCartney song, no need for conspiracy theories.

Funny how personal taste varies so wildly. Among the "lost" songs I couldn't care less about Free as a Bird, I find it a totally plain and insignificant song. But this brought a tear to my eyes. While I agree that it's definitely not the Beatles' or John's greatest song, I find it has some feeling and depth that the other lacked. But of course it's just my gut reaction.

Well, let's be polite and say that they're not the most characterful strings I've heard. It sounds more like a GM preset than a Solina or whatever. For that kind of money one could get a Mellotron Micro and a Behringer Solina, and be covered for all the 70s "fake string sounds" forever.

That sounds a bit, well, extreme? 😅 I've owned 14 Moog products in the last 10 years (all modern, no vintage) and none of them ever had any issue at all, including my 2016 D Reissue. Internet forums are not the real world, it's widely demonstrated that issues and criticism are amplified there. Textbook example of echo chamber and vocal minority vs. silent majority. Saying that EVERY SINGLE MINIMOOG has issues, like it was an absolute truth, is just useless alarmism. Especially when you admit that you never even tried a Moog product after the Voyager (that is what, 20 years ago?). As for the fact that in the new Minimoog MIDI, aftertouch and extra LFO are stupid useless features, and they even committed the fatal offense of putting THE WRONG STYLE OF MOD WHEEL...you're entitled to your opinion, we know everybody has one 😉

I was also about to say this. Of course, 300 is tiny next to global conglomerate monstrosities like Roland or Yamaha. But in absolute terms, it's not small in the least. I think the critical threshold for a company is around 100 employees, when they must decide if they want to stay small (less expenses, less competition, lower volumes, higher profits) or keep growing. That's a very risky endeavor because they step into the arena with the really big guys, but don't have yet a comparable critical mass. It's like a boxer putting on a couple of kgs and rising to the next weight category: he suddenly goes from being the biggest and strongest in the old class, winning every match easily, to being the smallest and weakest in the new class, and every match becomes a fight for his life. I think that's the situation where Moog was. To me, it's not korg that's too small for his product portfolio, it was moog that was too big for making a profit with very few, highly specialized product lines, all relatively similar and competing with themselves.

It's what korg themselves write on their official site: https://www.korg.com/us/corporate/profile/ Company Name KORG INC. Established on August 28, 1963 Registered on January 10, 1964 Capital 480 million-yen Number of Employee 295

I know, but I think it's misleading because it makes people think that Korg is comparable to the others, while in reality they play in totally different leagues. At least that's what happened with me: being used to see it in the same conversation as the big players, when I discovered how relatively small Korg was, I was absolutely astounded!

Yep. Thanks to its long successful history and vast product portfolio, people tend to forget that Korg is not that big at all. From its own web page, it declares about 300 employees. Roland and Behringer (both around 3000 according to wikipedia) are 10 times bigger. Casio (10'000 employees) is bigger than Roland, Behringer and Korg put together, although musical instruments is only a part of its immense business. And then of course there's Yamaha (almost 30'000 people) which is an order of magnitude bigger than anyone else. But if we want to talk about "Japan's Big3", that would be Yamaha, Casio and Roland.

This. Unfortunately it's a vicious circle: you tell them to turn down, and they honestly tell you they can't, because they're already barely audible...to their damaged eardrums. So they turn up, lose a little more hearing that will cause them to turn up even more next time, etc. I simply stopped caring about somebody who's deaf both physically and mentally: I just use the strongest earplugs I can find, and their audiologist will take care of the rest.

Like many, I don't understand the negativity. I saw Doley this summer in my city (a rare event in a small Italian town) and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. He was playing, singing his ass off, showing off his moves, talking to the audience a LOT, smiling all the time, clearly having a great time and sharing it with the audience. He seemed like a genuinely nice guy, and much more humble and down-to-earth than his onstage persona would suggest. What's not to like? He's a great showman, and they should show his concerts to anybody who thinks keyboards cannot be entertaining...especially fellow keyboardists. Was it the best concert of my life? No. Was it especially original? No. Was it a musical revelation that changed my life? No. Was it the best singer or hammond player I've seen? No. Would I buy his records? No. Will I start to learn his moves and use them on my gigs? No. Was it the best keyboard entertainment I've ever seen? Yes (sorry keith, cory and stevie) Did I enjoy every minute of the performance? Yes. Would I go to another of his concerts? Yes. Are these things in contradiction? Not at all.

The moment Nord puts in its instruments a big color touchscreen, or switches to wifi/bluetooth/web-based controls, will be the moment they lose me as a customer.

I'm also a very impressed KZ user. I currently have the AS10 but I'm going to upgrade soon to the Zs ProX. I agree that the only weak point is the cable. Could you share a link of the upgraded cable and tips you guys are using? Thanks!

Present-day Crumar is not the Crumar that built the Spirit. They don't even have the original schematics, they say in the video that they could only build it because they were given access to a vintage one, so they could reverse-engineer it. That takes a lot of time, and don't forget that Crumar never built an analog synth. It's like Tesla announcing they are doing a 12-cilinder, 600hp muscle car. Surely they'd be able to, but it's something totally outside their expertise and business model. It takes a lot of effort, time and money to do something so different, kudos to them for at least trying. But surely they cannot stop producing their main products that keep them in the business (digital reproductions of hammonds and electric pianos), it would be suicide. They just don't have the people to build thousands of Spirits...even assuming that there'll be thousands of customers, which seems unreasonable. Maybe they could sell 200 instead of 100, but hardly more than that without risking to break the company.

It doesn't say it's a soft synth, but it doesn't say explicitly it will be hardware, either. "Authentic recreation" seems to imply it, but its it just marketing slang that it's also used for any virtual instrument. I'm a bit skeptical because it would be an enormous departure from anything that Crumar has done until now. If they are really getting into the hardware analog synth arena, good luck and let's hope they do as well as Arturia a few years ago!