Mighty Motif Max

I don't count the weight of keyboard stands into the equation, since I would generally use the same one or two stand variants for any keyboard rig (unless I went beyond 3 keyboards live). For me it's just the combination of the keyboard and its case that I care about. I.e. when I was gigging my 63.5lb Motif XF8, the 30-ish pounds for the Z-stand I used was pretty negligible once I added the hardshell Yamaha case that brought the keys + case to over 100 lbs.

I, for one, actually really like the design in terms of aesthetics. It reminds me of a nicer version of the Kawai MP9000, but with a more "retro" style than, say, the Nord Grand. Kind of like a smooth Rhodes-ish look. I'm also liking what I'm hearing from the new "Grandstage X Piano" sample. I checked it out in mono via Sonarworks and it sounds like it might hold up pretty decently. It sounds less Korg-like (i.e. German Grand midrange) and more like an actual instrument. I am on the "too heavy" bandwagon however...I was surprised to see the weight spec.

The way I see it, if it isn’t a part that can be easily covered by guitar, bass, drums, or vocals, it’s most likely going to fall to the keyboard player to replicate the lines, unless there’s the budget for an orchestra. Even if it was up to the producer to program those parts, chances are they’d still be played using a keyboard controller. I do think that should have been communicated up front, but it’s sort of what I would expect going into that situation personally. A lot of folks seem to think of the keyboardist as being every instrument.

Overhauled with new vocal processing, new keybed, color screen, and other improvements. Looks like a load of fun. https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/microkorg2/

An updated KingKorg with a 37-key form factor. Would have preferred a 61 like the original, honestly. https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/kingkorg_neo/

New from Korg: https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/grandstage_x/ Paging @Paul Woodward?

I use a Moog EP-3 pedal and it works great. No complaints, and it's well-built.

You know, brother, all you do with this stuff is make younger players look bad. Like really bad. It's bad enough that we have to deal with accusations of being entitled and ageist, when that's not really the case for many of us...but people like you say this crap and then complain when the blowback hits. Also, it's really not your job to try to lecture a pro on something they've been doing and making money at probably longer than you've been alive (certainly longer than I've been alive). What's next? A thread dishing out the hate on Geddy Lee from Rush for doing bass and keys simultaneously? As far as that snark about "weak ass bass", check out this video from the late '90s of our very same forum colleague - if you don't think that's impressive, I'm afraid it may be time to look in the mirror. @DroptopBroham, I'm not saying you can't play or discounting your skill as a musician, but just because you don't care for a way of doing things doesn't make it wrong or inferior (I, for example, despise the Roland KC amps that you seem to be a fan of - but I respect that they're just the right thing for some folks). And honestly? If you can do it better, post a video and show us...if not, respectfully, give it up man. Maybe it's something about the so-called Florida music scene rudeness that I've heard so much about...but you really come off as unprofessional at best. I certainly wouldn't be inclined to hire you for a session or ever refer anyone your way.

I play both actual bass (electric) and LH bass on keys. I didn't do much LH bass until around 2016, when my church band at the time ended up short a bass player on a week when I was playing keys. Since then I moved, and my home church routinely didn't have a bass player. So I got pretty good at mimicking the way a bass player plays as I did this for literal years. I see it as playing two separate instruments when I play keys and cover bass as well - it's done wonders for my hand independence as well. At that church I will send my bass patch out a separate output through an actual bass amp. Depending on the song, I'll either use electric bass samples (I prefer Yamaha's which have some articulations built in, or Roland's SuperNatural patches that also do that type of thing vs a static sample), a B3 organ bass, or actual synth bass. I am actually in a jazz/pop/rock trio right now with guitar and drums where I'm anchoring down the bass as well as keys. Lots of fun. However, I love having a good bass player to play with. It's a VERY underappreciated role IMO. The bass player can make or break a song. I picked up electric bass too about a year ago and am definitely still working on that, but I can play well enough to do basic parts for my recordings and such. It helps already understanding what the sound is that I'm going for.

Sorry for not responding to this thread sooner - the Spring semester has started back up here at college and I've been super busy but I meant to post here earlier. I have owned and gigged a Fantom 7 for a touch over two years. I love it as an all-in-one for pop-oriented band work, but it is also missing some pieces that would make it a much superior board. Basically this thing's sweet spot is synth-heavy music, worship music, and pop music that doesn't rely on EP's much. It's also excellent for programming on the fly at a gig - you can play and program your splits/layers at the same time fairly easily. Pros: Excellent user interface - possibly the best on any keyboard I've ever owned. Organ engine is very good, and with some edits, gets close enough to my SK Pro that I don't need to bring it out for many band gigs if I'm using the Fantom. Huge back catalog of Roland patches (but missing the Fantom X/G patches which is very unfortunate) - I replaced a rack of gear with this thing and it's basically my Roland archive (I also own a maxed-out JV-1000 for the really vintage sounds). Great keybed - easily the best non-hammer action I've ever played. I can get a lot of expression out of it. It's possibly the only action of its type that I've felt comfortable playing piano on - I don't feel like I'm losing much in way of dynamics. Of course I made some tweaks with velocity offsets and such but it's really sweet now. Still being updated with major features - they recently added a new V-Piano setup, ACB synth modeling from the System 8, and Shimmer and Mod reverbs (super useful for those of us who do worship music where the shimmer pads rule). Great build quality while having a reasonable weight Full polyphony on the V-Piano engine. These aren't really suitable for solo piano use (I've done two of those gigs with it in a pinch and while the audience doesn't complain, I just don't think it really sounds like a real piano. But that particular tone is excellent in a band mix - no complaints there. SuperNatural Strings are a lot of fun - limited in variety, but very expressive and I miss the way they respond when I'm doing string parts on my MODX instead lol. Cons: Rhodes and Wurlis are terrible. The Wurlis are literally unusable for me, and I'm not crazy picky about those - any midrange or higher Korg, Yamaha, or Nord made in the last 15 years smokes the Fantom for EP's. If you want EP's, this is NOT the board for you (unless you gig a second keyboard with it). My current band uses a lot of EP's, and so I use my MODX-7 instead, despite its inferior keybed and interface. Clavinets are just okay...you need to use the ones from one of the EKZ expansions (the "Dual Clavi" patches to get anything usable IMO. Odd polyphony issues at times - the SuperNatural pianos seem to eat up a lot of polyphony compared to the older RD-800, even though they're supposed to be very similar patches. Luckily the V-Piano engine helps with that, but I still run into more polyphony issues with the Fantom than I ever have on my Motif XF, MODX, or my old Korg Krome. Missing the Fantom X/G patches and a lot of the Integra sounds. This means a lowly Juno DS has a few patches that I would say sound better (notably brass) than anything on the current Fantom. Can have boot-up issues. My issues seemed to be related to the automatic sample loading to the sample pads on startup, and I haven't had an issue in quite a while since disabling those, but the OS update process is a bit harrowing. Aftertouch is very difficult to trigger - to the point that I've quit using it. I understand that a new update may have improved that...I am concerned about the update process causing issues again though so I need to wait with that until I have a dead period for gigs. I have a lot of commentary in the big Fantom thread if you want to read further.

I’m going to say Yamaha, and go with a Montage M8X, EX5, and VL1. Then use a clone wheel for organs and just tape the logo over I guess. This assumes I had a roadie to help with the M8X lol. A close second might be Nord…in which case I’d do a Stage 4 88, Wave 2, and Lead A1. If I did Korg, they’d have to dig in their archives a bit and get me a Kronos 2 88 Platinum (or the red burst special edition), Triton Studio 76, and an N264. With those all maxed out on expansions of course.

Interesting - I’ve owned numerous current and past keyboards from Roland, Yamaha, Korg, Kurzweil, etc, and to me, overall Yamaha has by far the most realistic sounding drums. They still pale in comparison to drum software of course (I use Addictive Drums 2), but they’re not very far beneath, say, Roland’s current electric drum lineup (I own a TD17-KVX). I did like Korg’s crash cymbals on the Jazz kit introduced with the Kronos, but that’s about it.

That's my other pet peeve, especially when rack-mounting gear. I have to leave an extra blank rack space just for the PSU's to hang off, and can't even use the full complement of outlets. Either that or they have the block in the middle of the cord, which is a pain too because then there's another thing to velcro down and try to make stay put in the rack. For the record, I have plenty of gear with external PSU's, and will continue to. I just don't like that PSU style much.

I always appreciate performance videos because they're great for learning from. I will often do videos of my own band's shows and my own solo gigs to analyze later (same logic as recording my monitor mix direct). It's also really good for the rest of the band to be able to hear what actually "works" and what doesn't work so well. Like excessively harsh guitar tones, or a rushed fill on the drums. I find it ups the quality of the subsequent performances substantially.

I have had two different rack setups through the years. The current gig rack is not too different from many folks here - a half-rack Atlas Sound PSU, Samson SM-10 line mixer for the keys, and an FMR Really Nice Compressor as a limiter for my headphones. As you can see in the pic below, it's all in a 2U shallow SKB case, and I typically run an iPad up top for my monitor mix (or the band's, depending on the gig) with a Yamaha MG10XU mixer to get all the cabling conversion done. The outputs of the MG10XU run into the compressor/limiter, and then that is output via a chain of cords and adapters to a passive Behringer PM1 headphone amp (which only works with stereo over an XLR, hence the various adapters needed). The nice thing is that I can run a USB line out from the mixer to my iPad and record my monitor mix for later analysis/listening as well. The previous rack setup was this monster, which I built back in 2021. The intention was to have a full-fledged synth/keys rack that covered every base, with an external midi controller to run it all. It contained the following: Synth Rack 1 (4U custom rack case built by Case Smith Customs out of NJ) Roland Fantom XR Korg N1R Korg X5DR Roland JV-1010 Emu Proformance Plus Synth Rack 2 (2U SKB shallow case) Emu Proteus/1 Emu Mo'Phatt Yamaha DTX 2.0 drum module up top, mainly for a kick trigger Audio Rack (4U SKB case) Black Lion PG-X power unit iconnectivity mioXL midi router Ashley LX-308B line mixer All this controller by a Kurzweil PC4 via multi mode. I could have up to 16 channels of simultaneous program changes going on and 16 splits/layers of patches with this rig. Backstory: I thought I could achieve the capabilities (minus sequencer/sampler) of my Motif via a rack setup like this. Unfortunately, it turned out that the only MIDI controller on the market that could do what I wanted was the Kurzweil PC4, and that board's samples were largely superior to my rack system. Since this picture was taken, I've sold the JV-1010, Mo'Phatt, Fantom XR, and Proformance Plus (well, technically part of a larger trade to bring the price of a new b-stock Fantom 7 down to $800). The only one I miss was the Fantom XR, because Roland abandoned a lot of those sounds in their newer boards, and instead chose to keep the inferior JV/XV soundset alive. That and the first preset "Tremendously" in the user bank of the JV-1010, which was very unique and I didn't realize was not available anywhere else. I've kept the midi router, power unit, and Ashley line mixer, as well as the Korg N1R, X5DR, and Proteus/1. This entire rig cost me something like $5,000 with the PC4 included in that figure. And it never saw a single gig because I realized it was not only unwieldy but the PC4 outclassed almost all the rack sounds anyways.

Gator mini speaker stand. Will be used with my single ELX200-10P speaker, now that my older Yamaha MSR100 has given up the ghost (for gig use anyways). The MSR100 had no pole mount, so I didn't want to have one speaker on a pole and one not for gigs. Not an issue any longer.

Gen Z’er here - I in fact strongly prefer the IEC cable method. For one thing, you can easily find those cables almost anywhere, so if you show up to a gig and realize you forgot your power cord, you can go to the nearest Walmart/Target/Best Buy/etc and get yourself one for $10 or so. I don’t worry about the thin wires getting bent over time either, unlike many external PSU’s. But I can live with those.

Super cool regardless. Then again I only wish I had the woodworking skills to do custom shells like that. Wouldn't put that much time in for a Reface-based unit though. Although I have heard people say that they'd love a full-size Reface with the EP's, so this is perhaps one way of doing that. I'd be more inclined to do something like this with either an actual synth of some type or if a keyboard I had was beyond repairing back to the original specs in its current state.

I used to hand write out a little sheet with the keys for the songs in groups where we didn't use any charts and went full from memory. These days if I'm gigging the MODX7, it has this handy feature in the Live Set mode where I can add some text below the name (I think they call it the Slot Name or something like that), and so I'll just put that info in there (i.e. "Gm", "F", etc). If I still want to write out the section order (i.e. V1, PC1, PC2, C, Inst.), I'll do that on paper.

Taurus pedals, they didn't think of everything. I can imagine how much better that made this great song. I'll second that. As someone who finds the original song to be sorely lacking on bass presence (it's almost inaudible), I would bet that having a heavier bassline like that would sound awesome! 😎

Interesting idea, but I know it wouldn't work well for me - my playing is partly a reaction to the sound I'm using. I will play differently with a 2-layer piano like the Roland Session board piano than I will on a Nord with the Royal Grand, or on a Korg sample, because my ear picks up on how the piano responds to my touch and that in turn affects how I play it. I'm always trying to make it sound as "good" as possible, and so having two different pianos would mean I wouldn't be able to adapt in real-time to what the audience was hearing. I don't have as much of an issue when monitoring in stereo while the audience hears mono, or vice-versa, as it's more about accurately hearing how the dynamics and overall timbre are responding to my playing than how the stereo image sits.

Most band gigs: Synthogy American Grand (based on Ivory) loaded in my MODX7 and a custom V-Piano patch on my Fantom 7. The American Grand is very good in a band context and is a nice clear-sounding sample. Prior to that I used the S6 sample almost exclusively (it holds up well in mono). The V-Piano is quite nice in a mix as well, but falls short as a solo piano patch. Church gigs with a house-provided Nord Stage 3/Electro 6: Queen Upright 80% of the time, Royal Grand 3D 20% of the time. The Queen Upright is a fantastic sample for anything worship related, and honestly a good general-purpose piano. It holds up super well in mono. If I really want more of a grand sound, that’s when I go to the Royal Grand 3D. Note that none of the house Nords I’ve encountered have had the White Grand available, so I’ve never had a chance to try that live. Campus ministry gigs with more of an acoustic band: either the MODX7 American Grand, stock CFX Grand, or more recently, tweaked version of the Yamaha grand sample in my Hammond SKpro 73 if I will be using enough organ to make switching to the SKpro worthwhile (with its lackluster synth pads with no cutoff mapping to the mod wheel). Solo gigs: I used the PC4 7’ Yamaha sample for a while, then the KSounds Epic Grand for it, but was never happy. These days I’m midi’ing the PC4 to my MODX and using the various MODX pianos. But none of those are quite what I want in terms of the combination of feel and sound. My best old solo gig piano was the Full Concert Grand in my Motif XF8, which was helped by the nice keybed. I also used the AcousticSamples Kawai EX library for the Motif for a different flavor. Since then I had to quit gigging the Motif with my back issues not lending well to a single-man load in/out with that beast. But I’ve gone too many years not enjoying the piano samples I had available for solo gigs. Hence my saving up for a Nord Stage 4. I’ve been tempted to get a cheaper Kawai ES120 to just have a decent piano, but the lack of even a single basic pad sound and the price increase makes it a hard sell.

Never used a Samson DI but I use one of their SM-10 line mixers when I have multi-board rigs but a limited number of channels at the mixer. While I also have a nice higher-end Ashley LX-308B for my rack, I don’t notice enough of a difference that would make it through a live venue’s mixer, sound tech person, and whatever PA they have. The LX does make everything that touches it sound better though. For DI’s I’ve exclusively owned and used Rapco-Horizon boxes since I started gigging in 2010 (I’ve owned mine since 2015 and have had zero issues) - typically the DB-1’s but also they have a nice stereo box with mono summing which is a nice touch. Not sure what the general consensus is on those, but I’ve been more than happy with them.

This year’s quick and dirty recording for the relatives and such…not much in way of editing or cleaning up or multiple takes, but it’s all an improv on the spot. For something more traditional, this was the holiday tune I did two years ago.

On the contrary, that’s part of the selling price IMO and probably the best thing about Nords - the variety of sounds and improvements over time vs being stuck with the factory default samples forever. If anything I’d like to see some newer C7’s and Steinway D samples (currently the older Studio Grands and Lady D).