Vox Continental, Kurzweil PC4-7, Yamaha CK61/88

[AnotherScott]

I don't know if it's worth starting a thread for this, but Mr. Fudd and I were chatting in PM and the subject drifted to how I replaced my Vox Continental with a PC4-7. And as my reply started getting long, I thought some in the forum-at-large might find the journey interesting. But it also didn't fit neatly into an existing thread about any one of these boards, so I'm starting this one, and if it sinks like a stone, so be it. ;-) Here goes...

 

Once I got the PC4-7, the Vox Continental was made almost entirely redundant for my particular usage.

 

Both have semi-weighted actions I really enjoy playing (with Vox having an edge for organ and Kurz having an edge for piano).

 

There's less than a 1 pound weight difference between the two (I had the 73 Vox).

 

Neither has my absolute favorite piano sounds, but both are perfectly usable, and my piano preset of choice on the Kurz is something I like better than anything on the Vox (though I can't be sure I'm not also being influenced by the playability/action, as I never did a recorded comparison that would let me use my ears alone... though whether ears alone is the best test would be the topic for another conversation). As an aside, for piano sounds, my favorites are Kawai, Nord, and Yamaha, though unfortunately, Kawai doesn't put their really strong piano sounds in any board that is light enough for me to consider using.

 

Neither has my favorite organ, but I'd give Kurz the edge over the Vox. Which may be unexpected since I would take the full CX3 engine of the Kronos over the Kurzweil KB3. But the version of CX3 in the Vox is only a bunch of non-tweakable presets (you can change some things, obviously, like the drawbar settings, but there is no deep editing, whereas the CX3 has tons of it), and for the 19 or whatever preset CX3 sounds they assembled, none correspond to the presets I'd choose on a Kronos, much less including any personalized tweaks to them I might make.

 

Related, if you're sufficiently motivated, PC4 has assignable outs so it's easy to add a Vent. Vox doesn't even let you pan sounds, so a Vent would also end up on all your other sounds unless you remembered to manually switch it in and out every time you switched between organs and other sounds. I had that setup on another board once, and it was a disaster for me. It probably isn't as bad if it's your only board. But if it's part of a pair, you may go some time between when you play it and the next time you play it, so I found I would go back to the board to play some other sound, and forget that the last time I used it, I was using it for organ, and so my horns would have Leslie on them, for example. It was just unworkable for me.

 

Both have strong EPs (I also have the Purgatory Creek EPs in the Kurz). I never did a direct comparison, but I can happily gig with either.

 

For other sounds, there may be a sound here or there that I prefer on the Vox, but no deal-killers. The Kurz beats it with a much wider total range of sounds, and the ability to tweak them, and if need be, the ability to add more through built-in sample memory and strong MIDI functionality for grabbing sounds from an iPad, neither of which the Vox is set up to do.

 

If used as part of a pair, with my orientation of using the bottom board mostly for what Nord would call "piano library" sounds and the top board for almost everything else, I felt the Vox could only be a bottom (albeit one I would often use for organ as well), whereas the Kurz could function as either a bottom or a top, and that's a big difference in their total usability to me. Some of that distinction is due to the range and editability of the sounds of the Kurz, some of it is the split/layer functionality, some of it is just patch management. The Vox has only 64 storable patches, and no really great way to navigate them, no display to tell you what you're on. Basically, when it first came out, it only stored 16 user patches, and its navigation is still optimized for that, even though they added a multi-button way to access 3 alternate banks of 16. If you stick to 16 as designed, usability is better, but again, while 16 is fine for me as a bottom, it's too limiting as a top, and really, even 64 is borderline for a top, especially if navigation is awkward and sound customization and split/layer combination is so limited. Kurz of course is way ahead in patch navigation, sound customization, and split/layer combination, and supports way more than 64 sounds. Bonus: aftertouch! Anyway, the point is, for me, the Kurz is useful in either spot, whereas the Vox is only usable as a bottom... and as a bottom, it is not clearly definitively better than the otherwise more versatile Kurz.

 

In the end, there was only one way the Vox was unambiguously better as a bottom... as I just mentioned in the CK thread, I could cover most of its controls for live performance purposes, and it could be a really shallow bottom, allowing me to keep my top and bottom keys as close to each other as I like, and there's no way to do that on the Kurz. You need practically the full depth of the control panel available even just to get to the patch select buttons.

 

If you want to use an iPad to select patches, you can get around the awkward selection of the 64 Vox sounds or the having-to-keep-the-entire-panel-unobstructed issue on the Kurz, and that's viable, but I just didn't want to have to do that, which may simply be a bit of stubbornness on my part.

 

I think the CK would make a great bottom, and a reasonable top. As a bottom, it would certainly more than cover all the sounds I'd need from it (including the "top" sounds that, for one reason or another, I sometimes want to play from the bottom), and as I said in that post in the CK thread, it looks like it could be used in a "shallow" way, for times that's more important than the real-time control access, where recalling presets from a bank of buttons is sufficient. (And you wouldn't have to put the top board very much further away to be able to access the drawbars too... they're nicely also placed low-down right above the keys.) But 61 keys (even allowing for an unknown about its action) is limiting on a bottom and something I have rarely done (only when space and/or weight is at an absolute premium), and the CK88, as light as it is, is still heavier than anything I'm currently using as a bottom, and it has the GHS action which is questionable. As I've mentioned in the past, for some reason, I've found GHS much more enjoyable to play on some models than others, for unknown reasons. But I like that this particular GHS has speakers, which due to the vibrations you can feel, seem to make any hammer action feel better, so I'm optimistic that this may have one of the "better" feeling GHS actions.

 

On rare occasions, I may want to just use one board, and my ideal is a board where you can easily, quickly, independently select the sounds for the left and right sides of a split, as well as quickly/easily adjust their volumes and octave transpositions. IOW, I'd still be thinking and playing as if I had two independent boards, they just happen to be side-by-side in the same chassis. CK could be a front runner for this, it looks like it could handle that task pretty well. Very few boards are well-suited for this, The Fantoms are actually pretty good, but the only ones light enough for me to travel with (the 06 and 07) have actions I really dislike playing pianos from (and the piano/EP sounds themselves are weak as well). Dexibells may also be pretty good for this. 

 

For a bottom or an "only," I do prefer at least 73. For a top I prefer a 7x but am not entirely averse to a suitably flexible 61. But that again shows the benefit of a 7x, as being well usable as either a top or a bottom (action permitting). So yeah, count me among those who would have found a CK73 more enticing. But, I still might get a CK.

[Tom Williams]

My PC4-7 is actually both bottom and top for me -- it sits atop an 88 key semi-weighted MIDI controller.  All sounds come from the Kurzweil.  The only disadvantage is that I pretty much have to set up multis for everything.   

 

 

[sagetunes]

Interesting. I just took delivery of the VC73 BK today, sweetwater deal for 999. I needed a backup/rehearsal/ rig, and I was so lured by the price-drop. My live rig is a Nord E6 73 sw.

Impressions:

I actually liked the piano sounds, AP's and EP's. With some tweakage I could def. make good  presets/scenes. But I can't play AP with that action. I was slipping and sliding all over the place. Dealbreaker. I have no problem with the NE6 action, even on AP.  Didn't try clavs or any "other" key sounds on VC.

 

I actually like the CX3 engine, shrill yes, but with the proper amount of EQ etc, it can be roped in, especially with a Vent. I have a BX3 and vent in studio and it's sweet. With no routing options and precious little tweakability, Dealbreaker.

 

Didn't even deal with combo organs.

 

It's going back.

 

ps.  If anybody want to give me what I paid for it have at it.

 

We live and learn, not a huge deal.

 

 

[AnotherScott]

23 minutes ago, sagetunes said:

Interesting. I just took delivery of the VC73 BK today, sweetwater deal for 999...

 

Yeah, great deal, if it works for you. Though the CK61 at the same price is also compelling in other ways.

 

23 minutes ago, sagetunes said:

 

 

But I can't play AP with that action. I was slipping and sliding all over the place. Dealbreaker. I have no problem with the NE6 action, even on AP. 

 

Interesting. Well, that's why we all choose different boards. ;-) I found the piano dynamics more controllable on the Vox than on Nord's semi-weighted, probably because of how much more the Nord pushes back against my fingers. But the rounded edges which aid organ "smushing" also make more demands on piano accuracy, and that contributes to my feeling that the PC4-7 with its harder edges was more amenable to piano, and the Vox with its softer ones more amenable for organ.

 

23 minutes ago, sagetunes said:

Didn't try clavs or any "other" key sounds on VC.

 

I think the clavs feel very nice on that action.

 

[Doerfler]

37 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:

 

I think the clavs feel very nice on that action.

I own a very good condition E7 Clavinet. Having said this, the Korg Vox is the closest I have ever gotten to that experience, between the action, the sounds coupled with effects & NuTube, and the V861 expresion pedal that is included.

 

Just read that the retailer named in another thread title now has them in stock and has extended the discount for 30 days from when it was supposed to end, which was March 13

[AnotherScott]

7 minutes ago, Doerfler said:

I own a very good condition E7 Clavinet. Having said this, the Korg Vox is the closest I have ever gotten to that experience, between the action, the sounds coupled with effects & NuTube, and the V861 expresion pedal that is included.

 

Quite some time back, I remember mentioning that, from what I've played (which is most boards), the Vox was about the closest thing in a modern board  to feeling like a clav. Though I should qualify that by saying that I haven't owned a clav since the 70s. ;-) But it felt pretty close to right and brought a smile to my face, the first time I called up clavs on the Vox. It also nicely has all 4 clav pickup positions represented, which an awful lot of boards don't.

[niacin]

Given the comments and comparisons made concerning the Kurz PC4-7, here and on other threads, often by AnotherScott, I’d love to try one, and have also kept an eye out for the black Vox 73, but neither board has appeared on Australian shores.

 

I do wish Korg had put the Vox keys on the Nautilus 73, but the Vox seems to be a unicorn in a lot of ways. I use it as a lower board and it’s almost perfect for that role for the reasons mentioned in the OP, the only thing i occasionally wish for is the ability to adjust the octave of one side of a split.

 

And I think the YC Reface organ is perfectly serviceable buried in a mix, probably at least as useable as the Vox CX3 (which I don’t care for, possibly for the same reasons AnotherScott mentioned), and to my ears close enough to the KB3 I played on a PC4 (88) at a jam. But then I’m a self-confessed Hammond snob/addict and think there’s Hammond and HX3/MAG with Crumar and Viscount close behind, and then everything I wouldn’t use on a Hammond trio gig.

[sagetunes]

Here's the thing: A lot of boards don't sound great out of the box, and I'm an impatient bastard at times. I just went back to it, and sat down for 45 minutes and played with eq, effects, etc, and I'm beginning to like it more and more.

I think the vibrato/chorus is bad, but if you set it to perc, and use just a touch of chorus on the effects section on the right, it smoothes it out a bit.

 

I did read the manual, and even when I do RTFM, my brain doesn't comprehend manuals/textbooks so well. But just to clarify, Am I correct in thinking you can save EQ settings and effects in scenes, and it will remember them (w/ the exception of dynamics and nutoob drive which is fine). The manual is confusing to me.

Thanks in advance for that info. I think I can make a good rhodes and wurly if it remembers my settings in the scenes. If not that sucks.

[niacin]

26 minutes ago, sagetunes said:

Am I correct in thinking you can save EQ settings and effects in scenes, and it will remember them (w/ the exception of dynamics and nutoob drive which is fine).

the Korg Vox Continental scene memories include effects settings (multi fx, delay and reverb, including delay/tremolo tempo/time), but don’t include EQ.

 

There was some misinformation about this on Korg’s webpage for the 73BK edition when it first came out.

[sagetunes]

1 minute ago, niacin said:

the scene memories don’t include EQ.

Wow--not good. Insane.

 

[niacin]

18 minutes ago, sagetunes said:

Wow--not good. Insane.

 

Yeh it’s not imo preferable, but i guess it was designed as global EQ for adjusting according to the room or space you’re in. In the end I’ve only found myself wishing for it on one particular scene which I use to replicate Rick Wright’s Farfisa sound as he always had the top end wound back to smooth out what is otherwise quite a sharp, piercing sound, so i have to remember to hit the EQ button when I pull up that scene so it doesn’t take your head off.

 

Per sound EQ (along with per sound FX and Drive) is one thing I love about Hammond’s boards and it makes their limited selection of non-Hammond sounds go much further than they might otherwise, using say a combo organ or piano sound with the crap EQed out of it through a phaser or flanger to replicate a particular synth sound 😎

[sagetunes]

ahhhhh....so when you adjust the 9-band eq, that affects the entire board until you bypass the eq button, correct?

If so, that's really not so bad. So if I like my pianos and e. pianos bright, which I do, activate eq button, for every thing else just bypass. Not so bad. I guess I'm spoiled

with the hammonds and nords as well.

 

OT, but did original Vox and farfissa's have high or low trigger points. I thought it was hilarious in the manual where it pointed out that the tonewheel organs had a high trigger point and the next line down is "Default=Low". I've never played a real non-hammond combo organ of any kind.

Check out Pigpen on what I think is a Kustom combo--luv that tuck and roll.

 

 

[niacin]

31 minutes ago, sagetunes said:

ahhhhh....so when you adjust the 9-band eq, that affects the entire board until you bypass the eq button, correct?

If so, that's really not so bad. So if I like my pianos and e. pianos bright, which I do, activate eq button, for every thing else just bypass. Not so bad.

the OS update added adjusting the lid on the piano sounds with the pitch/mod lever so you might try that to adjust the brightness of the piano sounds, I think it gets saved in scene memory

[sagetunes]

Thanks so much for that info---very helpful!

[nadroj]

4 hours ago, niacin said:

the Korg Vox Continental scene memories include effects settings (multi fx, delay and reverb, including delay/tremolo tempo/time), but don’t include EQ.

 

There was some misinformation about this on Korg’s webpage for the 73BK edition when it first came out.

I thought the Vox Continblack DID save EQ settings - that was one of its selling points. I thought that functionality came in an update for the Orange Vox too at the same time. 

[niacin]

1 hour ago, nadroj said:

I thought the Vox Continblack DID save EQ settings - that was one of its selling points. I thought that functionality came in an update for the Orange Vox too at the same time. 

 

Um. No. Sorry. Marketing copy error posted on Korg's website and since removed.

 

I do wish you were right.

[Adan]

All this talk of tops and bottoms makes me think I''m on the wrong forum . . .

 

An unknown here is how the action on the CK feels, esp for piano.  Yamaha did a great job with that on the YC61.  The MODX not so much.  I personally think playing piano on the Vox is about as good as it gets for semi-weighted.  As always, give yourself some time to adjust; don't make a decision based on 10 minutes out of the box.

 

As an aside, I'm convinced that AnotherScott is actually 3 people: one that practices and gigs, one that writes endless eloquent well-informed and perfectly reasoned posts on multiple fora, and a third that does the shopping and watches reality TV.

[stoken6]

6 minutes ago, Adan said:

As an aside, I'm convinced that AnotherScott is actually 3 people: one that practices and gigs, one that writes endless eloquent well-informed and perfectly reasoned posts on multiple fora, and a third that does the shopping and watches reality TV.

Hence "another". (And another, and another...)

 

Cheers, Mike.

[sagetunes]

4 hours ago, niacin said:

 

Um. No. Sorry. Marketing copy error posted on Korg's website and since removed.

 

I do wish you were right.

I can corroborate niacin's findings. Just got mine yesterday. EQ is global, so if you don't disable your last EQ curve, it's here there and everywhere. It will remember your eq curve from boot to boot...on everything, so you've got to remember when to use or bypass eq by just hitting the EQ button. Not ideal at all.  So if you like your piano bright, your organ is gonna be super-shrill. There is a way to open lid of piano with pitch bend/leslie speed lever and save that to a scene. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

[sagetunes]

3 hours ago, Adan said:

 

 

I personally think playing piano on the Vox is about as good as it gets for semi-weighted.  As always, give yourself some time to adjust; don't make a decision based on 10 minutes out of the box.

 

 

Agreed--I should take into account it was very cold in the basement last night, and maybe the fact that the keys are factory new, and might get less slippery with time/use.

[AnotherScott]

9 hours ago, sagetunes said:

OT, but did original Vox and farfissa's have high or low trigger points. I thought it was hilarious in the manual where it pointed out that the tonewheel organs had a high trigger point and the next line down is "Default=Low".

 

Interesting question! But assuming the original Vox combo did not have a high trigger, I could see why the default would be low... When it comes to organ, simply based on the name and the (original) color, and the fact that, of the three organ models shown on the front panel, Vox is the one that is highlighted, Korg was always conceptually marketing this as a Vox first.

[niacin]

On 3/18/2023 at 2:03 AM, sagetunes said:

Agreed--I should take into account it was very cold in the basement last night, and maybe the fact that the keys are factory new, and might get less slippery with time/use.

of course ymmv, but i’ve played piano gigs on it playing mostly full stride and New Orleans style piano with no issues.

[ludo]

As from today, new proud owner of VOX 73 BK here.

I followed this beautiful board for more than a year...

[ludo]

And after one minute playing this beauty, the key feel remembered me with the keybed that was in my Kurzweil SP4-7 years ago.

Is it a Medeli ?

[AnotherScott]

The SP4-7 had a nice action. I think the action in the PC4-7 is an updated version of that one. The Vox is different, and better in at least one respect, that it doesn't get stiffer toward the rear of the keys like those (though even those Kurzweils play pretty well pretty far back, and are much better than the low-end Korg and Roland actions that have that issue to a worse extent).