confidence

No, and that is something I intend to do and a possible option.

Thanks everybody. Didn't mean this as a comparison thread, but as we're there: Another possibility is a second hand Yamaha CP4, which seems to have the same action as the CP88 but a much wider range of (still very high quality) sounds. If I went for a Nord it would probably have to be the Piano 5 (since what I REALLY want is a quality hammer action 73-key), which looks like being pretty expensive once it's available. I've come round to accepting the 88 form factor due to sparseness of alternatives, and the Yamahas seem to tick most of my boxes and sound superb. I was just interested in how this aspect of Nord works, and I must admit it's tempting.

OK thanks both, that makes sense. Seems like a much more sensible way to get a board that perfectly fits your requirements in at least one respect (sounds).

I've never owned a Nord keyboard, and am interested in the piano 4 or 5. I'm curious about the business of downloading your own choice of sounds from their site, and how it works in practice. Do the keyboard come with a reasonable chunk of empty memory that you can fill with your choice of sounds? Or do you need to remove something to make space first every time you want to add something else? The specs say how much memory each model has, but not how much the factory sample sets take up already. As per my other thread. I'm also interested in the Yamaha CP88 but slightly put off by the limited palette of sounds. The ability to have access to such a wide variety (without having your keyboard clogged up with hundreds of sounds you never use) on the Nords seems like a great advantage. Just the Project Sam strings alone hugely increase the value of the instruments. But am I missing anything?

So does that mean the PC88/73 should be getting more towards that scale with a few more updates? Or that there are fundamental differences in the design and architecture that mean it's never going to be that kind of instrument. Not that I particularly want that. But mature, quality stage keyboards like Kurzweil Forte (say) seem to typically have around 200-300, and that seem to be enough to cover reasonable expectations without getting into Motif / Montage / Kurzweil PC line 1,000+ territory. The PC88 when it first came out was closer to one of those home/school keyboards with 12 sounds operable by 12 buttons on the front! (though obviously much higher quality), and even now, it's got a way to go.

The montage is lovely but I want a piano hammer actions (so would need to be Montage 8) and I want it portable (so not Montage 8 then!). I don't know about quality comparison but the PC4 I think had 500+ sounds.

I've been considering this board for a while now. Love the sound of demos I've heard and, while I'd need to play one before buying, I've always liked Yamaha actions. One thing that put me off at first was the extremely limited number of sounds on board, particularly once you get out of bread-and-butter AP and EP territory. I understand these have been increased with updates to the OS. But then I read somewhere they were planning to release these about once a quarter, and the last one I can see any reference to was in September 2020. The good thing is that nearly all the sounds there are super high quality. I understand the difference between a stage keyboard and a workstation and am happy to see it in the appropriate context. A slightly more comprehensive orchestral/wind/brass section and I'd probably buy. Anyone know if there's anything further on the horizon? This is mesmerising:

It's not the same action. MC1000 and MC2000 are semi-weighted. MC3000 is fully weighted hammer action. Also it's bigger.

MC3000 is awesome but it's 60lb.

Yes the scenes thing looks useful, but I would see that mainly as a way of managing changes of setup within a song (eg moving from verse to chorus). Not sure why you would save some song setups as separate presets and others just as scenes within those. Seems unintuitive. It just seems like they made some weird choices in designing the board. Noone is going to use eight MIDI outs or four simultaneous USB ports, but a lot of people are going to frustrated by filling up 128 preset slots and then have to bugger about saving things externally and reloading them. Hard to understand this when the memory used for such things is surely not that expensive.

I've been close to buying a K5EX for a while now. I have its predecessor the Oberheim-Viscount MC2000 and have come to love and rely on its MIDI capabilities, although I've outgrown the action and now want a fully weighted one. FWIW, the things that stopped me from pulling the trigger: - Not hugely impressed by the sound in the demos, particularly the AP. So I'd be buying it purely as a MIDI controller (although it doesn't seem possible to find a "non-EX" version). - Uncertainty about the action (and inability to try it as noone stocks it in my country). They say it's fully weighted, but not that it's the same as the K4 (and from comments above, apparently it isn't). I'm really interested in the idea of a proper, fully weighted, high quality piano action but in a 73 key format. Eg Kurzweil Forte 7 (although that also seems impossible to get now, except on order new for far too much money). Words used to describe the actions across the range seem inconsistent and unclear. - While the MIDI spec is generally fantastic, I note it only has 128 program locations to save to, which is a bit restricting for something you want as the MIDI "brain" of a rig, where you should be able to save every possible combination of connections for instant recall. Even my MC2000 has 256, and its (equally old) bigger brother the MC3000 has over a thousand! When it first came out I read someone say that the 8 MIDI out ports are a legacy of the same feature on the MC3000 - that they were reusing leftover parts, or the same circuit technology or something. No idea whether that's true, but it does seem a wierd choice of feature to spend money on in these days of USB, soft synths and smaller rigs due to each box being able to do more. I'd be surprised if anyone ever used them all. It's a shame it didn't take off, as there's not really anything else like that on the market at the moment.

Yeah, that's what I meant. That damned run that has to fill in every gap whether it has anything to do with what came before or not.

I think there's a specific historical factor here: Tatum came from the tradition of solo stride pianists who were employed as one-man-bands in speakeasies, bars and brothels all over the USA for decades. The whole strength and solidity and virtuosity of the left hand accompaniment came to be what it was because it HAD to. These people weren't playing in bands; they lived or died based on how they could fill a room with a complete musical world when there was only the budget for one musician. That's why it was "a LEFT hand like God". Any half decent jazz pianist can tell you that playing fast intricate right hand solos that impress people is easier than it looks. Doing it while also providing a rhythm section with the other half of your brain is the thing that separates Tatum/Hines/Peterson etc. from Powell/Monk/Evans etc. That's why solo jazz pianists now tend to come across more like skilled reproducers of historical artifacts than original and engaging artistic voices. A bit like period instrument performers or traditional folksong collectors. And then I wonder whether such solo improvisation of a complete musical texture just is, inevitably, a less effective way of doing things that's always likely to lead to a less engaging musical creation. Having to improvise so many complete layers at once means you tend to fall back on predictable learnt patterns for some of them. Even when you might find something quirky or original on the spur of the moment, you end up having to relegate it to auto-pilot while you then think about what the other hand's doing. (This might be the appropriate moment to admit that I HATE Tatum and can't listen to him. All those formulaic, context-irrelevant right hand runs just make me sit there and think "why is he playing all those notes?") Oscar's interesting in that respect. When he plays stride you always get the impression that it's the easiest thing in the world for him and he could have presented himself mainly as a solo jazz pianist in that tradition if he'd wanted to. But why would he want to, when he can have Ray Brown provide far more thoughtful bass lines than the little bit of his own brain free to take of that ever could, and have his whole brain dedicated to playing solos that are not just fast but musical too? I dunno. One thing I eventually ended up learning was that just because you can do something, doesn't mean it's the right or best thing to do. I wonder whether there won't be any more virtuoso solo jazz pianists that are genuinely interesting and original, simply because it's not the most efficient way to achieve musical interest and originality.

How so? Identical "carbon copy" is exactly what the word clone means.

Yeah, great playing . . . Man, that piano sounds rank though.

So you'd suggest giving any potential organ to buy a "smear test" first, then?

That's a good idea, why didn't I think of that? The mixer has a mono effects send on all channels, including the stereo ones. I can't imagine I'll ever use this as I don't known any outboard effects, any effects I use live are within the keys and modules so added to the sound before it gets to the mixer in the first place, and any I use in the studio are within the PC. So when I want to switch to the mono amp I can just being this up and the master faders down. Thanks!

So I've got a new mixer - Mackie ProFX10. A couple of keyboards and modules, along with return from the PC, feed into it. Main outputs feed studio monitors. I want the secondary output (control room outs) to feed the single monitor speaker that I use in mono as a keyboard amp live. So that I can switch between hearing things in a clear stereo mix (mainly complex mixes from PC) and hearing how single keyboards will sound when I'm practising them the way they will be live. What's the easiest way to connect the stereo control room outs to the mono amp? People say to pan everything left and just connect the left output, but I don't want to do that because I want to retain the stereo spread for listening through the monitors. There must be some simple little box or something that I can feed the control room stereo outs into and take a mixed down mono output from? The only thing I've found is the Radial Mix 2:1, but it's £125 which is more than I paid for the entire 10-channel mixer! How does that work?!

Pardon my ignorance but what's the 88-note under the Roland?

That may well be so for some. I know it isn't for me because I actually started by gigging with a controller keyboard and rackmount PC, in the days before laptops were powerful enough and very few people used computers live. I never did the whole rackmount thing in the 80s and 90s when the the now-classic units were new. I came to them afterwards, once I sat down and figured it just wasn't a feasible use of my time to be spending it making sure my live PC worked properly, for the number and value of gigs I was doing. And I noticed the drop in quality when I made the switch, but at least it meant I could throw some stuff in the back of the car having not played it for two months, go to a gig, set up and it would just do exactly what it did before.

I can see that, but wouldn't something like a 73 key Kronos (or even a 61, depending on just how "tiny" your current MIDI controller is) really be that much more schlepp? And wouldn't any difference be made up for by the fact it's in one box rather than two, not needing cable connections between yada yada, and the reduced maintenance and setup?

I see you're relatively new here, well this is a topic that does come up quite a bit so all I can say is "here we go again", lol. What "fallibility and instability" do you speak of? I started with a laptop rig in 2001 - that's closing in on 20 years ago. Full-time & exclusively laptop since 2006 - a mere 14 years. Sure I've had a few hiccups but nothing show-stopping (except once, for about 60 seconds when my MOTU audio interface disconnected â I switched to my headphone output & the show went on). That's a pretty good record for the amount of gigs I've done and the number of years I've been doing them, I think. And, even though I'm not keyswitching different articulations in realtime on a gig, I still very much appreciate having my multi-gigabyte acoustic piano with release samples & resonances â whether or not the audience can hear them. I hear them. My other patches are sounding good to me too, and I'm pretty sure some of them would be hard to duplicate on a hardware keyboard. Anyway, as this thread shows, you have to be comfortable with and enjoy your gear, otherwise what's the point of all this? If using hardware makes ya happy then I say "F" software and do your thing! I just wanted to rebut what I see as the typical criticisms about software reliability that seem to come up here. From my experience - it's just not so. Well arguing about general principles on the basis of one person's individual experience doesn't make much sense. Looking at the operation of lots of such units in various real world situations, there's no way anyone can reasonably deny that computers are less stable and reliable than specialist audio hardware units. You just can't. They crash more often. Unexpected things due to unforeseen conflicts between software, updates etc. happen more often. They're more likely to have some internal part start functioning differently and cause overheating, etc. etc. These things are simply true. Of course, HOW true is another question. It may well be that someone's computer creates such a drastic problem once every five years, whereas their rack unit simply NEVER does, and they can live happily with such a minor downside for what it gives them. Or it may be worse than that. A lot has to do with how good you are at maintaining computers. I've done it, live, and I agree with you it had fantastic advantages. And it generally worked well for me. I had a few problems but only one that really fucked me up, in terms of not being asked back again. To be honest, what ended up making me feel it wasn't worth it was not the number of times things went wrong, but the amount of time and hassle that went into maintaining the system in such as way that I could ensure they wouldn't. But as with anything, YMMV. Keep meaning to reintegrate a computer into live work but in such a way that I don't rely on it entirely. Eg use keyboard sounds for bread and butter but have option of routing some things to computer for where it really shines, with backup from keyboard if necessary. That seems like the way to go.

Both are correct. For studio use, software has long since sounded better due to larger available sample sizes, CPU power etc, and has infinitely better GUI and workflow. For live use, computers are great in theory but you just can't escape the ultimately fallibility and instability of them. And some of the things they're superior in (like access to huge numbers of articulations in sample-based instruments) are not so relevant when you're playing live and limited to what can be done in one pass, anyway. I have a Yammy motif ES rack and even an old Kurzweil PC2-R that I use live mainly for the KB3 organ, and a few choice sounds though most of it is dated and horrible. I'd njump at being able to have the capacities of a Kronos, Montage AND a few others all at my beck and call for live use, without having to schlepp multiple keyboards to the gig.

I want to be Oscar Peterson. Unfortunately, however, there are far greater barriers to realising that ambition than my choice of keyboard.

I use the big version SRM450, with 12" horn, as my "keyboard amp". Loud, clear and uncoloured, much better than anything sold as a keyboard amp I've ever used.