Kurzweil PC4

[AnotherScott]

7 minutes ago, Stokely said:

 I'm struck by how few programs there are compared to my PC3.   This doesn't actually bother me too much, the PC3 list was so massive it was hard to navigate! 

My guess is that was the strategy of providing so few Programs, so finding things would not appear so overwhelming. But you can load your PC3 Programs into it.

 

9 minutes ago, Stokely said:

I don't see an obvious analog for the "quick access" section of the PC3, that would be a  bummer.  The Favorites are nice but that's way too few for gigs.

The chart at https://kurzweil.com/2021/09/02/comparison-chart-workstations/ is confusing on this point. It says it has 990 "Favorites/QA entries" -- but it also says that about the PC4, which actually seems to have 500, not 990 (it has 50 pages of 10 entries each, IIRC).

[Delaware Dave]

from what you describe it sounds like the Forte is switching the effects from the current to new program.  On my PC3 it is not noticeable except when leaving an organ and going to another voice. I think this is because I use a double leslie which use 14 of the 16 DSP effect units.  So if i go from organ to a phased rhodes the 2 remaining DSP units are not enough to load the full effect associated with the rhodes program so the rhodes starts dry then as the organ is released it transitions to the Rhodes effect while I'm playing.  As the Forte has 32 DSP units this should occur less than on the PC3.  There is also some transition setting either in midi mode or master mode about transitioning. i seem to remember a setting that was supposed to be set to "instant" in order to minimize this.  poke around in the various modes either midi or master or in control setup #126.

 

 

 

[Fuzzy1]

AnotherScott  On a PC4 the  Q.A.'s have 50 banks assigned to them but all You have to do is type in bank #51 and there you go!   So, yes, a PC4 can have 990 Q.A. entries.

 

 

[Stokely]

That makes sense and might explain why it's not on every sound.

 

I'm actually R(ing)TFM right now and a couple of my questions have been answered.  Namely, yes you can have banks of favorites, and WHERE IS VAST?!   Answer, I was in "Regular" mode and not "Advanced" which opens up most of the functionality     I also determined that I'm up to speed OS-wise (I thought that might be why I wasn't seeing some things) so I'm going to check into that soundtower librarian/editor.  I'm spoiled by the Novation browser-based librarian, that thing is dirt-simple and convenient (though it isn't an editor).

[jarrell]

I would be leery of using the SoundTower Editor - using their PC3 editor corrupted some patches on my PC3. Yes, that was some time ago, but, haven't really heard any votes of confidence for it. YMMV.

[AnotherScott]

9 hours ago, Delaware Dave said:

percussion which is  routed through the C/V rather than around the C/V.  Nothing like warbly percussion to ruin the experience.  You need to turn the C/V off when engaging percussion. 

 

Might it be possible to create a VAST program that was ONLY percussion, layer it with the organ sound, and send it through the same Leslie effect? Even if a percussion "sample" doesn't exist, you could create one. Though I don't know if the Kurz VAST/sample based system is capable of the appropriate single trigger (so the sound only plays when no other key is depressed). I also don't know whether you can create a Multi that combines KB3 organ with a VAST sample-based sound and put them through the same Leslie effect...?

 

  

9 hours ago, Delaware Dave said:

Apparently organ is not a priority for them. 

 

Well, they don't have an organ-centric board like Yamaha YC61/73/88, Roland VR09/730, or Korg's Vox Continental, but in terms of what's built into the workstation (or workstation-like) boards from all these companies, I think KB3 beats what you find in Roland FA, Yamaha MODX/Montage, Korg Krome/Nautilus. (I don't know about Fantom yet.)

[Stokely]

6 hours ago, jarrell said:

I would be leery of using the SoundTower Editor - using their PC3 editor corrupted some patches on my PC3. Yes, that was some time ago, but, haven't really heard any votes of confidence for it. YMMV.

Yeah, I'm already a bit skittish as the descriptions on the Soundtower site sound a bit dated.

I've got Dave Weiser's patches to load in, and we'll see what "gaps" I have after that.   I certainly get a bit lost with Vast.  For example, I took a nice-sounding moog-ish lead and said "let's do the Styx oberheim lead" (the sound he used a lot that had the 5th in it).  I'm thinking, I'll find an "oscillator" and tune one of them up a 5th...well, that simple-sounding lead program had 14 "layers", and I fumbled around until I found a way to tune one of them up...but it wasn't exactly right.  I'm not sure what all those layers were doing, they certainly were not spread across key ranges for example (like some patches on the MODX do with the Elements).  So I have some major learning to do in order to generate my own patches.  From past experience, just slapping programs into Multis to make a "fat" sound rarely works--less can definitely be more.

Probably first up will be a poly synth.  The program called something "saws" is pretty close to what I would use on Loverboy and other 80s tunes, though it needs a bit more attack and a bit of detuning.  It has a nice raw "analog" sound to it.  The other poly synth patches sound thin and over-compressed, which could be from an effect I could remove.  That said, if anyone knows of a good 3rd party patch library (sample-based or just Vast) that would be great.  I already know about the Barb and co patches and might take a flyer on one of those.

[Stokely]

Posting this question here, hopefully the PC4 and Forte don't differ in this area.

I'm having issues getting the Forte to read a usb drive.  It's complaining about the formatting, which was exfat, then I re-formatted to NTFS.  Those appear to be my two options in Windows 10.

This is a big high-speed usb thumb drive that I got for recording band tracks, so I'll try an older, smaller and slower one and see if that's the issue despite the error saying formatting.

Kind of odd I can't find any information on the disk format/type required for thumb drives.  

Edit:  Tried a 2GB thumb drive formatted FAT32 and the Forte likes it.  I'll dedicate this drive to be my Forte drive!  I'll leave this post here in case it helps anyone else.  Not sure if it was the smaller size, slower speed/type, or the formatting that did the trick.

[stoken6]

I think it's quite common for "appliances" to standardise on FAT32. istr I needed to download a third-party utility to format FAT32 (which has a 4GB limit iirc).

 

Cheers, Mike.

[Stokely]

All's well, i knew all those old smaller thumb drives would come in handy one day!

For anyone wondering, those Dave Weiser patches are excellent.  In particular I'm finding the "analog" leads, pads and poly synths on this instrument sound much better than I remember on my PC3.   They sound fantastic, but everything else is sounding great too; those just surprised me a bit.

[Dave Weiser]

22 hours ago, Stokely said:

All's well, i knew all those old smaller thumb drives would come in handy one day!

For anyone wondering, those Dave Weiser patches are excellent.  In particular I'm finding the "analog" leads, pads and poly synths on this instrument sound much better than I remember on my PC3.   They sound fantastic, but everything else is sounding great too; those just surprised me a bit.

So glad you like the sounds! Anyone here can feel free to hit me up and I'll send my custom sound set. Includes gig-ready pianos, better EPs, lots of analog type synths, a few Mellotron/Chamberlin type things, and a few sounds I've done for acts like The Who and Brian Wilson. Also includes a few useful multi templates that work well as a starting point. weiserdav@gmail.com

[Fleer]

Do get those sounds from Dave Weiser. They’re magnificent. And don’t forget to add the ones from Purgatory Creek. They’re must-haves. 

[ehand]

I'm considering a Kurzweil PC4 SE, which doesn't have physical drawbars like the standard PC4.  Does anyone know whether or not the touchscreen allows virtual control over the KB3 drawbars?

[AnotherScott]

The Kurzweil screens are not touchscreens. But yes, while the sliders on the PC4 are nice to have for these adjustments, all the drawbar adjustments can also be made through on-screen menus. Also, they respond to standard MIDI CCs, so an external controller should work as well. Since these models support class compliant MIDI devices, you could proably get your sliders by picking up something like a Korg NanoKontrol (preferably the older one, with 9 sliders instead of 8).

[miden]

1 hour ago, ehand said:

I'm considering a Kurzweil PC4 SE, which doesn't have physical drawbars like the standard PC4.  Does anyone know whether or not the touchscreen allows virtual control over the KB3 drawbars?

 

Programming is a nightmare!! Unless you grew up with Kurzweil

[AnotherScott]

25 minutes ago, miden said:

 

Programming is a nightmare!! Unless you grew up with Kurzweil

Often, but not in this case.

 

Call up any KB3 organ sounds. Hit the EDIT button on the front panel. Hit the soft button marked DRAWBAR. Now you're on the screen where you can easily and obviously edit the values of the 9 drawbars, as well as see a nice visual representation. When you're done, hit EXIT, and either Save your changes (to the existing location or a new one), or not.

 

That said, changing the parameters on this screen is not as smooth as operating the slider. It's great for programming in the drawbar registrations you want, it's not designed for real-time tweaking during performance. For that, adding an external controller would be better, or making use of the existing sliders on the board, even though that won't give you access to all nine simultaneously.

 

This kind of "surface level" editing really isn't bad at all. Drawbars, splits/layers, etc. Deep editing is another story.

[miden]

1 hour ago, AnotherScott said:

Often, but not in this case............

 

 

 

Yeah, I was meaning overall Scott...not the actual organ section which wasn't too bad really, apart from setting controllers - organ sounds were easy ...although I did have the physical sliders on mine.

 

[Synthaholic]

There's a new OS update for PC4 on the Kurz website. First since last summer.

 

https://kurzweil.com/pc4/#downloads

[Synthaholic]

I backed up all on my PC4-7 to my Flash drive. I updated the OS. I loaded all from my Flash drive. PROGRAMS, SAMPLES and MULTIS seem to have restored correctly, but all of my QA BANKS are gone, reverted back to factory defaults. Not good.

[Sean M. H.]

On 5/8/2022 at 5:19 PM, Synthaholic said:

I backed up all on my PC4-7 to my Flash drive. I updated the OS. I loaded all from my Flash drive. PROGRAMS, SAMPLES and MULTIS seem to have restored correctly, but all of my QA BANKS are gone, reverted back to factory defaults. Not good.

 

Can confirm I just updated the OS and I was able to restore my QA banks without any issues

[Synthaholic]

On 5/14/2022 at 3:37 PM, Sean M. H. said:

 

Can confirm I just updated the OS and I was able to restore my QA banks without any issues

When you did your data restore did you choose FILL or OVERWRITE? I'm wondering if that has something to do with it. I may have chosen FILL. 🤷‍♂️

[Sean M. H.]

13 minutes ago, Synthaholic said:

When you did your data restore did you choose FILL or OVERWRITE? I'm wondering if that has something to do with it. I may have chosen FILL. 🤷‍♂️

 

I believe I did overwrite...and when I selected overwrite, it gave me the option to either 'overwrite' all the user objects (there are none there anyway after formatting the flash to do the update) or to 'merge' the saved objects with the update objects.

 

I'm not sure what 'fill' does...but I would assume ot looks for empty slots and puts things there...so maybe it put your user QA banks at the end of the list, after all the factory ones?

[rockinredeye]

Synthaholic, when I did the latest update, I restored everything successfully with OVERWRITE, which puts everything back where it was with the original numbers. I believe FILL packs everything into the lowest numbers possible for each category. See page 9-22 in the user manual. Since there are 50 factory QA banks (supposedly, I think there are hundreds possible just like the PC3), maybe try looking for your QA banks in the 2000 or 3000 range, or BANK 51. I started by replacing the factory banks at #1 so I haven't gotten that far yet. I use four or five banks per gig, naming each bank by date, location and "A", "B", etc. as in 10Jun22AmLeg A. American Legion first bank. I still have a job from 2010 in my PC3!

[pawelsz]

I think I have found my QA bank 1 in bank 17 after restoring backup using Fill. 16 first banks are factory ones by default, and 16th is empty. So it starts filling from 17. Not sure about overwrite. 

[Delaware Dave]

Redo the process again but do overwrite and all should be well. Use the backup file you already have when you are doing the overwrite.

[kaptainkeys]

Question for PC4 owners, does the USB-A port on the back support both powering and interfacing with an external keyboard controller like the the USB ports on the Korg Kronos?  Looking at buying a PC4 and was curious if it had this feature.

[Tom Williams]

3 hours ago, GotKeys said:

Question for PC4 owners, does the USB-A port on the back support both powering and interfacing with an external keyboard controller like the the USB ports on the Korg Kronos?  Looking at buying a PC4 and was curious if it had this feature.

Yup.  I use it with an M-Audio Keystation.  Not sure how much current it supplies though. 

They comprise a a slightly wonky pair -- I have to wait until the PC4-7 is fully booted before I turn the KS's power on.

[tonybanksfan]

On 1/29/2022 at 7:24 PM, Stokely said:

That said, if anyone knows of a good 3rd party patch library (sample-based or just Vast) that would be great.  I already know about the Barb and co patches and might take a flyer on one of those.

Malcolm at https://www.enjoythesirens.com/ has some very good quality patch’s of various famous songs. Some items available are not listed on his site but just ask him what else he has. You might be interested in his 80’s various set, Springsteen,Rush, or Heart sets, I bought them all and have modified probably all of them to work in many other songs. Good guy and very helpful, check him out.

[kaptainkeys]

8 hours ago, Tom Williams said:

Yup.  I use it with an M-Audio Keystation.  Not sure how much current it supplies though. 

They comprise a a slightly wonky pair -- I have to wait until the PC4-7 is fully booted before I turn the KS's power on.

Thanks Tom, I'd have a similar use case (PC4 88 with a Novation Impulse 61)

[allan_evett]

Impressive sounds from Enjoy the Sirens! The depth of Kurzweil programming allows for eerily good vintage keys emulations; spot-on to what I'd hear when flipping on the radio in the 1970s and 80s.  I gigged with a PC3 for several years; had a lot of fun utilizing Dave Weiser's programs.  I feel that Kurzweil and Korg are the strongest mimics of other keyboard instruments; my Kronos 61 was 'central command' for a series of Pink Floyd tribute shows I did in 2015.

 

Finally got to play a PC4 when I was at Sweetwater last October. Sounds very strong, with thoughtful features; typical for the brand, and including some tasty additions..  Still not getting on that well with the newer pianos, but digital piano preferences are so subjective to individual players.  I enjoyed theTriple-Strike pianos much more, when choosing my PC3 for single-keyboard gigs in the 2010s.  But for all else, I liked the Kurz sound a lot.  Looking forward to playing a K2700 next time I visit Sweetwater.