nadroj
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Posts posted by nadroj
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sdrawkcab eman.
Avatar: ddur luap ekil osla I. syek deyalp eh erehw sdeirf fo edosipe na saw erehT. ratava ym ti edam.
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14 minutes ago, konaboy said:
after watching and enjoying a few videos yesterday I can answer a couple of questions that were posted here, based on statements from Andy from Roland.
poly is 256 (approx) when using zencore sounds, drops to 32 in total when using the models, for example juno-60 or 106. These are of course shared between the multitimbral parts. For example, when using 4 model tracks, you have 8 notes on each, which is adequate for any Juno emulation! Roland apparently have some clever algorithms to handle note stealing.
kayboard is the same as the new fantom-0 series, albeit with aftertouch (don't think the 0 has that).
my thoughts, looks and sounds beautiful, the concept is wonderful, love that they stuffed a 5080 and RD piano in there.
i heard comparisons with original 106 and it sounds close enough. Wish it had the pattern sequencer in the style of JD-Xi. not clear to me on the capabilities or limitations of the step sequencer.
Would love to see you with one of these Woody - you’ve already conquered Korg and Yamaha. Roland next? 😁
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I’ve softened a bit. The videos certainly out-do the on-paper specs. I accept now that the hardware is obviously the selling point. Aluminium body, aftertouch and internal power supply are all big pluses - though expected at this price point.
For all of the people online (YouTube and Reddit, some Gearspace) complaining that it doesn’t have ACB or whatever…the truth is there are lots of people who are going to produce some wonderful music with this thing.
I can get over the Zencore crossover stuff (Roland seem pretty adamant they aren’t going down the Korg/Behringer route by re-releasing actual analogue classics and the sooner we accept that the better - though I must say Behringer will happily eat up their share in the market for breakfast if it comes to it) but the two gripes for me are: 1) the keybed (if it really IS the same as the Fantom0 - you’d think at this price point and with the rest of the hardware they’d include at least the keybed found in the flagship Fantom) and 2) the price. This synth has a lot of competition at this price point…Hydrasynth Deluxe, Nord Wave 2, anything by DSI, Korg’s latest offerings, maybe the new Oberheim coming out…it needs to stand up to those things.
As it stands the potential ROMpler sounds are ironically the thing that sets it apart - not the hardware, not the features, not the sound. Every comparable product can deliver similar sonic results, but without the ROMpler capabilities. Will be interesting to see how it sells.
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I don’t get it. If it’s purely ZEN core stuff all they’ve done is throw their current VSTs in a box with the Juno name and design and are charging 2 grand for it???
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Nord and Korg by a country mile.
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I don’t like the Bosendorfer pack either. Used to like the “Mellow Grand” but now I find them all flat and uninspiring. Much prefer the CFX. I also happen to think that the Nord piano samples are the best hardware has to offer by far, but there are plenty of people online who hate them so much you’d think they were sampled by satan himself.
Point being: piano sounds are very subjective. If you don’t like what others like that’s fine. If you don’t like them, don’t let them hog up memory in your instrument.
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Zoom MS-70CDR is a steal for the price. Focuses on chorus, delay and reverb. 70+ effects, 120+ with a firmware update. Some nice filtery things too.
Can pick one up for £65 if you know where to look. There’s a few vids of it being used with keyboards on YouTube, definitely a go-to multi FX pedal for our type. Search for the one where it’s being used on a Rhodes - heavenly sounds.
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Ouch. Bruised my tail bone 2 years ago and still get sore if I sit wrong (or on a bad bench) for a while. They can take a long time to heal.
Hope you get better soon. In my case as time went on I was able to sit on more and more surfaces: started super soft cushions, then a mattress, then harder cushions.
Just be mindful of your back. When you start sitting again you may be tempted to sit in such a way that eases the pain for your butt, but is terrible for your back. I have a recurring back problem, and there have been a few times when my tailbone was still healing when I threw my back out after sitting awkwardly on an uncomfortable stool for an hour. Same goes for how you lie down - if you lie down in bed in a way that puts pressure on your back while taking it off your ass it’s going to cause problems. You don’t think of these things at the time because you’re just enjoying the relief, so try to always be aware of your posture.
Speedy recovery, Steve.
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Even simpler than sharing - simply copy the link in the toolbar and paste it here. It should embed automatically.
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55 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:
I think this might be what you're looking for...
https://yamahasynth.com/learn/montage/mastering-montage-vcm-mini-filter-and-mini-boost-in-os-v3
Check especially the section "In Da Night Boost"
Though also keep in mind, there is a reason people like analog and virtual analog synths... you can't quite get the same places with sample or FM based synthesis. This is an area where competitive boards like FA, Fantom-0, Nautilus, PC4 can have an advantage over MODX (though yes, the VCM Mini Filter and Boost help). If you don't get close enough to what you're after, you might consider taking advantage of the Zone Master functions of the MODX to integrate an external sound source. There are some nice VA apps you can run from an iOS device. Or for lead work, you could also look at real rather than virtual analog in a little Roland SE-02. These are all things that are small enough to fit right on the MODX7.
That article was exactly what I was looking for, will have a play around when I’m home tonight. Thanks.
I’ve used the model-d app with the MODX before and it’s outstanding. Love it. If I can’t get what I want on the MODX I’ll likely get it on that.
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Digging this. Hard. The groove, the understated vocals, the wonderfully subtle pitch drifting textures on the chorus layered with the organ (big Nic Semrad vibes)…the solo…the lead tone…good stuff.
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Cory Henry’s new tune below (which incidentally I love) has a nice lead sound - slightly overdriven to the point where at first I thought it was a guitar! Sounds sweet.
The MODX is many things, but intuitive when it comes to creating a sound from scratch it is not - at least in my experience. I can’t find a way to get a little bit of drive on a saw lead without using an effects slot. Also, because of the myriad of options I’m always a little confused using the Moog style boost/filter effect they added. Assigning the effect’s cutoff setting to a knob doesn’t actually do anything - and then what am I supposed to do with the filter on the actual element when using that plug-in effect?
anyways. I’m experimenting with the drive effects, but haven’t found anything that gets me close to this kind of sweetness yet, but I know the MODX can do it. It’s buried in there somewhere. Anyone know a good way to get a little bit of drive from the lead sound that starts around 2.17? I’m using a basic saw lead from scratch but happy to be told that’s way off.
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Mistakes in our band are laughed at. Our singer once kept singing the verse when it was supposed to be a fairly well known keyboard break, on a song we’ve played literally hundreds of times. It was a fairly big show and I could tell he was embarrassed. He actually said “sorry Jordan” into the mic mid song, then said afterwards “I don’t know how many times we’ve played that song, but I’ve never ever done that. F**k sake” and everyone in the crowd laughed.
If the drummer misses a beat or something, or the bass player slips and plays a howler we laugh. What else can you do?
Last Saturday was a funny example of this; there’s a part in one song where everything apart from the kick drum drops out, and the singer gets the crowd going. Usually the singer shouts “GET STOMPING” on beat 1, which is me and the bass player’s cue to play a little riff on the first beat of the next bar, which brings everyone else back in. Sometimes he shouts half way through the bar which is funny, but we’re used to it and always manage to come in together. Last Saturday he said it at a totally odd time though; not even on a sub division of a beat or anything that made sense, and it totally threw everyone. Bass player and I couldn’t work out which beat to start on, and the drummer was poorless. Something similar happened later on in the set where the singer was so far out in the crowd he brought the drummer back in at a totally random time, and he had to reset the beat. Again we just laughed it off. If the band is fun things like that don’t matter too much, even if the show is sold out.
Agree with the above though, there are few things worse than band members in foul moods turning to you visibly on stage and telling you to turn up, or frantically waving at you. I don’t mind signs or nods, but turning their back to the crowd to motion to you with their whole body is incredibly off-putting. During a sub gig I did once, the singer turned to me during an intro and shouted “PLAY THE STABS!!!”. I had no idea what he was talking about so he started imitating stabbing out piano chords…in front of the whole crowd. Problem
was there were no stabs in that song at all, just padded organ chords, but it turned out their usual keyboard player played piano stabs there instead, and the singer was too used to it to adjust to anything different. Was left with egg on my face there. Not nice when the band makes the crowd think you don’t know what you’re doing!
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Joke’s on you, I don’t make mistakes.
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Edinburgh Jazz and Blues festival is the 15th-24th of July, sure there will be someone in need of a good organist. Type the above festival into google and have a look. Might also be worth contacting the Edinburgh Jazz Bar, lots on there over the festival, including jams, etc!
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That’s what has always annoyed me with Roland. They fit great features into keyboards that are just impractical or unfun to play. I agree with MOI, but their market research/play testing teams need to get their fingers out and speak to real people. Even their 88 key’s behemoths with beautiful actions are cumbersome and ergonomically difficult to work with outside of the home.
which is a shame because on paper their boards slay.
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On 3/31/2022 at 11:42 PM, AnotherScott said:
I just picked up a Fantom-07, we'll see whether I keep it. The thing that persuaded me was the Rhythm Pattern feature, with its pre-defined easily selectable intro/outro/verse/chorus/fill/variation stuff while (hopefully) being able to easily change the sounds I'm manually playing, with the goal of possibly being able to use it instead of the Korg PA1000 for gigs where I'm providing drum rhythms. The instant appeal is in having 76 keys in 15.4 lbs (compared to 61 keys in 23.7 lbs). Related, if I'm providing the drums, there's a good chance I'm doing LH bass. The PA1000 is one of the best 61s for LH bass, because the front panel octave button can switch just the RH sound while leaving your bass section as is, but that's still not as good as having 76 keys, where you're less likely to have to do octave jumping in the right hand in the first place.
Other potential advantages over the PA1000 in the rig (as a "second board") include more real-time controls, VA synth functions, more MIDI flexibility, more split/layer functionality, better organ. (I don't necessarily need all these things, especially depending on what else I'm pairing the board with, but it's nice to have the options.) Both boards have some nice modeled behaviors (SuperNATURAL Acoustic tones in the Roland, DNC in the Korg). The Korg has a big advantage in having aftertouch, and its speakers sometimes come in handy, too. So, pros and cons, as always.
(Side note that I also sometimes use the Kurzweil PC4-7 when I need drum tracks. It works okay, but it's just one beat for the whole song. If there is a way to use front panel buttons to switch to different patterns for verses, chorus, fills, endings, etc., I'm not aware of it. And so far, when I've done it, I've played the LH bass on another board, I haven't figured out how to do it all at once on the Kurz. I'm posting another thread about that.)
Initial impressions:
...As Miden and Sean have said, the action is indeed, well, uninspiring. I think it's workable, but to compare it to its more typical competition, I'd say it's not as good as that of the MODX7, which in turn is not as good as that of the PC4-7.
...It's interface was more confusing than I'd expected it to be. One important thing to know that you wouldn't know by looking at the controls, if you're trying one out somewhere, is that double-clicking a button is often essential in being able to get where you're trying to go. (Also, shift-clicking it.)
...while I do like some of the SuperNATURAL behavioral attributes, as a whole, I don't think acoustic instrument emulations are generally as good as those in the PC4-7 or MODX7, or the PA1000. At least so far. I have more exploring to do.
...I ran into some note stealing and weird sounds when playing with one of the Scenes, A-004 Brass+Sax on the first page. I'll need to get back to this and see what's going on.
Question: For those who have one, are there any sounds pre-loaded in the User bank, from pages 116-128? I've already determined that my box was not a factory-new unit, and I suspect that the fact that my User bank has a bunch of sounds there is, I suspect, more evidence that this had been used as some kind of demo unit. I would have expected these locations to be empty. Are these empty of full on your units?
I think that's largely because the VR series have numerous effects dedicated to the organ sound, whereas the organ in the FA seemed kind of shoe-horned into the minimal effects-per-sound capabilities of the FA. So the FA struggled to do a decent simultaneous rotary and overdrive effect, and omitted simultaneous chorus/vibrato altogether. But even though the new Fantoms have inherited what is basically the one-insert-effect-per-part architecture of the FA, they seem to have special-cased the tonewheel engine so that it overcomes those limitations. (The additional resources required may be related to the fact that the tonewheel organ is the only Fantom-0 sound that is not available with seamless sound transitions.)
From the video Charleston posted, it's actually 64 samples (4 banks of 16 samples that can be associated with the 16 pads).
The good news... YES, while the drums are playing, you can easily select ANY tone you want for another part. Also good news... each screen can have up to 20 sounds to choose from (compared to 8 on the PA1000, and 9 or 10 on the PC4-7, though again on the Kurz, I haven't yet found a way to play multiple parts with the drums). Also, the star rating system lets you easily assemble a couple of screens that will have all the sounds you're likely to need. The bad news... there is no seamless transitions when changing from one of these sounds to another. On the Korg and the Kurzweil, I can generally make these changes seamlessly.
But if you can keep the number of sounds you need to switch among down to 15 (perhaps occasionally swapping some out for some others, or saving some different combinations of 15), you can place them in different Zones within the Scene, and then you can switch among them seamlessly... though in that case, I haven't yet seen if I can keep the bass going and just switch the RH part.
Yup. Another initial frustration... walking up to the board and trying to find a sound that used the tonewheel organ engine. The manual doesn't specifically tell you how to do it, either. But I found it. I have not yet come across any obvious way to control the ninth drawbar from a front panel control, only by going to the screen with the organ graphic. (Which again, was something that took me a while to figure out how to get to.)
Yes, it has that function. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp1FuZhTeQs
Scott, you’ve often talked about the playability of the PC4-7 in very positive terms. Would you say that that’s one area the Kurzweil trumps the Roland in?
Also, does the Kurzweil fall far behind the Roland in terms of ease of use? Assuming the sequencer/ DAW integration between the two isn’t worth comparing.
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3 hours ago, miden said:
One thing I think WILL be annoying is the limit to the Scenes..max of 512, and while that does sound a lot, consider when an user creates many song based scenes as well as generic scenes...they will run out very quickly. And yet there are a "gazillion" user sound slots?? Most of which will never get used...well not by me anyway
I know that up to 16 parts can be set in a scene, however when using external keys it can become an issue, for example unless the Fantom zone "focus" is on the zone of say, the organ, then the controls on the Fantom have no effect. EG rotary control...and of course if you switch the focus to the organ zone so that the Fantom based controllers work, the Fantom keybed as well as the external keybed play the same sound. Mind you you it was exactly the same with Korg and Yamaha in this area.
So of course this means an external controller playing the organ cannot have its CC Mod Wheel control the rotary. The only workaround I have found (and it still does not fix the rotary control device issue) is to set the key range to G9-G9 on zone 2 (organ) and then have both zones selected to play.
And yet another niggle, what do Roland have set to the Mod wheel when in VTW mode? It does this ridiculous huge pitch change down to the sound disappearing and when reversed the sound bends all the way back up again??? Come on Roland how about the standard mod wheel settings, exhibited on pretty much all the synths I have played and that is - Mod wheel set to Off Rotary=slow, Middle position Rotary=off and in Full on, rotary=fast? In factory condition only the paddle controller can be used for rotary...I'd really NOT have to go and edit every VTW on it to use the standard (well I think it's pretty standard) organ setup.
I mean if you’re using bread and butter sounds for a lot of songs (eg. Piano, organ, EP, clav, synth pad, lead, etc) you can save all of those individual sounds to one scene and switch between them when needed. Even if you need different split combinations with the same sounds, you can use the performance part pad setting to create different combinations (splits/layers) of all of those sounds - in one scene. I did this in my FA, and the result was that for almost half of the gig I was in one scene. The rest of the scenes were used for specific sounds and combinations. In a band with a 50 song setlist, as well as all of the other projects I worked with, I never came close to using even 50 scenes - you can cram enough usability and flexibility into one scene to carry you a long way.
And IIRC the mod wheel organ thing - that’s replicating cutting the power to the organ, which would create a dive bomb/pitch bend effect on a real tonewheel (organ players please correct me if wrong). Not sure how often organists actually did that in the real world, but I think Roland are trying to get brownie points by showing that they’ve thought of that. The Roland Paddle (the other pitch bend stick) is set to rotary toggle, which feels much more natural, like a half moon switch, than the mod wheel does.
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A lot of boards (including the new Fantom) are including audio/MIDI interfaces in their spec sheet now. Could you have one board that covers your bread and butter that has a built in USB/Audio interface, then for gigs where you need it simply being along your laptop and a cable? No need for separate interface and cables.
Alternatively, the DMC/Gemini combo with a Radial Key Largo (3 x stereo input and audio over USB) thrown into the mix would give you your bread and butter sounds, with an excellent controller to use your laptop with, all going into and coming from the Key Largo.
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1 hour ago, EscapeRocks said:
I think we are forgetting some things to keep in mind about the new Fantom -0's
First: In comparing key length, fulcrum point, and SFX tones, you need to take the square root of the number of Curtis chips, Dave can still get a hold of.
Then with that number you can clearly determine the value of the 3rd op-amp on the second modular PCB underneath the touchscreen.
Then, with a metric tape measure, measure the distance from the back of the lowest key to the front of the highest key. Then measure the length of a single white key. You can now work backwards to get the overall lenght of the key-bed (Pythagoras)
take that and multiply it by the number of sub-outputs, times the number of TRS outputs, not including headphone jacks, and feed all of the above into the Bat-Computer, and Alfred will be right up with the results that will tell you the Fantom 06/07/08 is a cool keyboard, that hits a sweet spot for those who don't need everything the big brother has, and is priced accordingly.
LOL just having fun, but wow....have we analyzed this one to death?
You’ve clearly no idea what you’re talking about.
Taking the square root of the number of Curtis chips helps you determine the value of the 4th OP-amp on the modular PCB, not the 3rd. The first law of turboencabulation makes it so that Curtis chips can’t efficiently share voltage between anything less than 4 op-amps. It’s been a problem with these chips for a while.
proof:
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Ah, ok. That makes the effects slightly more diverse than I thought. I thought you could only have one effect + reverb + delay.
But if I’m right it’s quite a bit more extensive than that; if I wanted a Wurly with tremolo I could use the pitch bend lever + drive via the valve + chorus via the effects section, then reverb and delay with their seperate knobs? That’s pretty cool if so.
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The octave shift is the most annoying omission I can see.
As is any audio in (even a 1/8 inch Jack - many keyboards have at least that, which is useful for home practice).
Question I’ve always had; does the drive effect need to be selected for the valve drive to work? Or is that independent of the effects section?
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See the new black version in action with everyone's favourite Katsunori UJIIE
OT: "About Your Avatar or User Name..."
in The Keyboard Corner
Posted
Aussiekeys, im impressed you went through the effort to decipher my post. You nailed it. Kudos!