CHarrell

Slick, Dave! I have a lot of nostalgia for the CP300, it was the first keyboard I played where you could really tweak the sound in any capacity...I'd make an EP/strings layer with tremolo and felt like such a badass 😂

Man I'm so glad I came up in the last ten years.

Would you say that's quick, though? Really, even "ergonomic" boards like the MP7SE operate this way, where you press a button to get you to the effects screen, then you choose your effect, then dial in the parameters. Granted, MP7SE does have lil rotary encoders you can use to immediately change any of the four parameters displayed on screen.

Hm, that looks a little too barren on the front panel to be the 300, actually. Maybe the 5 or 1?

Also, I reviewed some pics from Hermeto and Jovino's concert from a few weeks ago, they were not playing the CP4: I don't know what exactly, but it's a lot beefier! Possibly a CP300? One of my old roommates got one for like $200 a little bit over 10 years ago...the thing I remember most about it, besides getting a taste of programming by dicking around with tremolo settings etc., is lugging that damn goliath up a long flight of stairs for a weekly gig at a restaurant. 😂

Amen to that. Where you at?

Sorry to hear that! I lived in AZ for a year and a half, the only thing you can count on is it letting you down. 😉

Wow, how reassuring, thank you. Man I must seem like a ping pong ball with this. 😅 With the interface, would you say it's really quick to say: you have an EP with a chorus sound but you wanna change it to a phaser. Would you press n hold the insert effect A/B button to pull up the effect, then scroll to the effect you want based on category, then alter the parameters to your taste by cursoring your way to it (ex phaser rate), then scroll wheeling it? In practice, how fast and easy is that?

Oh, gotchu. I used to live in Mililani.

Similar story here in Seattle.

Oh wow! Do you live on an island outside of Oahu?

Thanks for the added insight on this. Glad you got everything resolved!

Beautiful advice all around, and I think this kind of situation, as frustrating as it can be in the moment, is also just good for developing as a person. If this sort of thing goes unaddressed in a forthright way, it will inevitably lead to simmering resentment that will bubble over in ways that will create even more friction between you and the band members. Your consideration in taking the rest of the band's feedback is admirable, and you've put a lot of effort into creating something that will please them, but you're a member of the band too! As such, your voice deserves to be heard! It's clear that you don't feel your needs being met, but as someone once told me, "Closed mouths don't get fed", and your band peeps ain't mind-readers.

Dude that's wild! You actually programmed those things?

I'll be honest, I didn't care about it much til DAWs like Cubase announced they'd cut off VST2 support. On one level it's frustrating because of all the awesome VSTs out there that have been abandoned for years (still feeling the burn when practically every DAW dropped 32bit support), but on the other hand, VST3 has been out for almost 20 years at this point, so I can kinda get industry flagships trying to nudge technology forward by capping off an older format.

I'm surprised they actually went and finally updated at least the majority of their plugins to VST3...only took them like a decade.

Thanks so much for those insights, you two. *sigh* I have a feeling if I'd get the CP4, I'd just wish I'd be playing the 88. I need to do some thinking, but I'm probably gonna bump up my budget...what's the phrase, you either buy cheap or you buy twice? (...or...ya know.....three times..........) So now here's a fun issue. Now that I'm thinking of getting a "current" board: it's been almost two years since the last CP update (and was a while before the other one)...Yamaha is frustratingly tight-lipped about this, but I wonder with all the overlap between the CP and YC, if the CP is unofficially dead. I've been on Ideascale for years and at this point it's basically a bunch of CP owners begging Yamaha for any kind of status update, let alone an actual keyboard update. And now, with the latest update, YC has now introduced a mechanical keyboard that even the CP88 doesn't have. Fodder for a 1.6 update? Sure, but there's just no guarantee at this point...either they're doing a mega update, or they abandoned ship on the CP88 entirely. So now, if I can find one used, I'm tempted to do a @Michael Wright type solution and get a YC88, with a more promising future, along with a cheap but decent nothing-weighing 61 second board for the organ I briefly owned the YC88 before its 1.2 update, which is when they really seemed to take things up a notch. Obviously, there are way more sonic possibilities than the CP, but there were some niggles I had with the interface. One of them was the effects, where you had to flip through the list of 30ish to get to the one you wanted. There's the shortcut effect-type buttons where you press EXIT and the switch to toggle through them, but those are so far apart that it was invariably a two-handed effort. This can be an issue when you're, you know, using two hands to play (the CK has this issue as well but it's somewhat mitigated by the effects types actually being listed on the panel with a knob to quickly scroll through). I've been looking through the update release notes, but did they ever address that? Or has anyone found a good workaround to that solution?

I was a big acoustic snob ten years ago and immediately turned my nose up at anything that sounded "overly" synthesized as corny. However, a friend played the theme from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence for me and I teared up from how beautiful it was, which opened my mind up to synthesizers being a powerful musical tool. So I was at a prime point for being hooked for life when one night, I noticed my roommate's brother had left a little keyboard in our living room, called the..."MicroKorg"? It looked like a cute lil toy but I couldn't resist the novelty of playing it...and I became enchanted for hours. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was just so awestruck that I could play the same ol' black and white keys I'd been playing on for years at the time, but these beautiful, new timbres were coming out from underneath the fingers. "I'm, MAKING, these sounds come to life!" I never did quite learn how to use that thing, but not too long after I got really into FM synthesis, falling in love with FM8, and then years later, the Minilogue XD was what really got me to intuitively understand subtractive synthesis in a way VSTs never could do. So yeah, I'm a Korgi boy...my dream synth is a modernized MS20/Prologue hybrid.

Yes, the keyboards themselves are about that weight, I'm curious about the keybed action. They're both NW-GH, but I've seen multiple reports that the CP88 is heavier than the 4 (which in turn was heavier than the 5, but that was their NW-Stage).

So I've been thinking about it and I'm going between CP4 and Kawai right now. As I said earlier, I loved how expressive the ES920 was, but there are some performance features that are sadly missing. Those are rectified by the MP7SE of course, but that's an extra 12ish pounds...I'm not the weakest dude around but there really is something to be said about performance convenience when you're your own roadie. As keyboard players we probably have at least 100 lbs of equipment to move for any gig, so anything that can reduce that is a major plus. So the CP4 has these performance features at the same weight as the ES920, as well as multiple simultaneous effects and more tweakability. I know I've stated that my primary concern is the interface, but I wanted to check in again on the claims that the CP4 keybed is lighter than the CP88. Is this accurate? If so, how noticeably? And for those who do indeed prefer the CP4's sound quality, what is it that tips them in its favor?

Yeah I was surprised it had aftertouch, I haven't played many weighted boards with it...I think the NS3 might be the only other one I knowingly played with it, I don't remember having an issue with that one (the Numa X also had a very surprising lack of modulation you could assign to it, so it's really questionable why they even bothered). Well actually my buddy in high school had an S90ES, I remember always liking to play that thing, but I'd have had no clue what aftertouch was at that time.

I was actually pretty impressed with it, maybe even hella impressed, but the keybed...I dunno if I use all the lingo properly, but maybe it bottomed out too hard? Too shallow? I felt the impact of the keys coming into contact with the board, and it ended up hurting my wrists which was a shame, honestly. I've had arthritic symptoms since I was 13, so I'm just really sensitive to that sort of thing. Honestly if that wasn't a concern for people, I'd HIGHLY recommend giving that one a shot. The sounds, the consistent updates (ring ring, Yamaha! You listenin???), and a good action in a really lightweight package for a good price? Studiologic is doing a much better job of Italians taking over the world than Mussolini ever dreamed of.

Thanks for this. "Discerning" is one word...sometimes I just wonder if I'm too damn picky and indecisive for a soon to be 30 year old. 😂 The thing that I try to balance is my love for keys and my love for creating sounds. While the CP88 didn't have a synth engine per se, the effects and part controls practically made it a synth in my hands, and I felt like I was orchestrating on the fly. But, on the other hand(channelling Tevye from Fiddler), what inspired me to sell the CP88 was I played one of my first live shows since COVID earlier this year and I couldn't escape the feeling that the keys were just a little too heavy for what I was doing, even though sonically I just about had perfect control (minus things like the piano sounding a little crummy out of my Spacestation V3--probably on the way out too). To be clear, one of my biggest influences is Bernie Worrell so I find myself bringing that kinda energy. As fortune has it, my local GC has a used MP7SE so I'm gonna go in today and give myself a refresh on the RHIII with the Kawai sample sets.

Oh no. 😭

Nice! That sounds like a good solution, all things considered. Thank you for the clarification, too, that makes sense. In terms of the sounds of the CP/YC88, there's honestly more similarity than not. The YC has the FM tone generator (nice touch), and the organ engine, obviously, but all the pianos, EPs, clavs, etc. are all identical across the two; on that front, the only difference is which ones are offered since there's still a few I wanna say are present in the CP and not the YC (yet, it seems at this point). In other words, I'd say you're highly qualified to know the sound differences between the CP4 and the CP88 in addition to the action. But again, what I have the most questions on is the interface of the CP4. I've looked up tutorials and have read the manuals, but those can only give a very limited snapshot of what it's actually like to use the instrument.