Top or bottom board - Kronos vs. Fantom

[Losendoskeys]

I'd go Kronos 61 top and 88 bottom, but I pretty much do that now (I have a 73 in and L shape - see my profile) and it is all encompassing

[ABECK]

On 2/19/2022 at 4:37 PM, Moonglow said:

So here’s my situation. My current live rig is a Kronos 88 (bottom) with a Jupiter-80 (top).

Are you a weight lifer!!?? 😦  That's a fun rig to cart around!!

 

[TJ Cornish]

On 2/23/2022 at 10:13 AM, AnotherScott said:

 

 

One thing that bugged me about CX3 on the Kronos was the ergonomics of it. I never used it much, so maybe some of this is addressable, but for example, for rotary, I want a footswitch to toggle rotary speed, and a panel light or screen indicator to tell me its current status. I didn't like the buttons for the percussion controls... those thin buttons that would butt right up against each other were hard to hit quickly and accurately, especially if the area were not well lit. And I seem to remember that the lights in the button didn't necessarily always align with whether or not that percussion function was engaged...? Maybe I'm misremembering. Either way, I wonder if the Fantom's clonewheel ergonomics may be better? Certainly the LED ladders next to the faders would be useful. In hindsight, when using the Kronos for a CX3 sound, it might have been beneficial to navigate off the Set List screen and to the CX3 visuals, where the on-screen display and touchscreen buttons may have been helpful, rather than relying on only the physical Kronos controls.

  

One thing I'd look for in a single-board scenario is, does the board let me do a split in such a way that, mid-song, I could easily change the sound on one side of the split, without causing any glitch to the sound I'm still playing with my other hand (as well as independently adjust its volume and octave). Seamless sound transitions alone do go a long way here, in that of course you can seamlessly switch from one split combination to another, but it does require that you have pre-setup both of your split combinations in advance. Sometimes I just like to grab sounds on the fly, as I need them. Obviously, with two boards, you can just keep playing one board while you change the sound on the other. But when you split a single keyboard, it's not always so easy to treat the two halves of it so independently. Kronos is weak at that. How is the Fantom?

 

 

Not sure what version of Kronos software you last used, but rotary status shows on the main screen even in set list mode. To see drawbar positions you need to dig in a few screens, but you can at least see where the rotary is. Other parameters like percussion and C/V are harder to see. The Fantom is significantly better in this area.

 

Can’t separately split sounds on the Fantom in an easy way - you can dig in to the scene settings and change the sound, but there’s no quick way to do that that would work on the fly in a live setting. One workaround that I use a lot is to have a lot of sounds layered up but muted. On the Fantom, MFX chains are fully allocated, so no need to manage IFX slots like on the Fantom, and no polyphony is used when parts are muted, so you could load up several sounds for that half of the split if you knew what you wanted and select between by hitting the mute buttons.

[kaptainkeys]

49 minutes ago, TJ Cornish said:

One workaround that I use a lot is to have a lot of sounds layered up but muted

The Kronos can do the same thing by using the KARMA scenes, at least from my understanding.

[TJ Cornish]

1 hour ago, GotKeys said:

The Kronos can do the same thing by using the KARMA scenes, at least from my understanding.

You don’t even need KARMA scenes - you can just use the regular timbre mute. The practical limit to sounds that can be on deck on the Kronos is number of IFX slots - that’s the scarcest resource there. The Fantom has a simpler effects structure, but the advantage of that is you can actually load up 16 sounds and they all work and sound the same (polyphony limits notwithstanding, which isn’t a problem if you’re muting/unmuting).

[Joe Muscara]

6 hours ago, ABECK said:

Are you a weight lifer!!?? 😦  That's a fun rig to cart around!!

 

Yes, it says so under hobbies on his profile. Also, I guess that means you haven't seen the pic…

[Moonglow]

6 hours ago, Joe Muscara said:

Yes, it says so under hobbies on his profile. Also, I guess that means you haven't seen the pic…

Ha! Those days are long gone...

[Joe Muscara]

17 hours ago, Moonglow said:

Ha! Those days are long gone...

So you're not going to share the pic for him, even though it's from 1989?  

 

[Moonglow]

LOL. Actually, I still lift weights, which probably does help with my rather heavy rig. As to the picture, that for sure is long gone...