Hammond Tease XK-4

[Stokely]

re: love

Just spitballing, but I'm guessing there are a few factors.

I still think people want good organ sounds.  However, for many people the "good enough" threshold has been met already by older keyboards (and pedals).  Or maybe I'm just speaking for myself   I would have killed for what I have now when my "organ" (quotes needed) was coming from a Motif classic...or go back a fair bit more when my Emu Proteus was my hammond sound!  We are in the land of diminishing returns.
 

For studio work (and live) a lot people have moved to software.  I was using b3x for a while myself, and I still think it's the best sounding organ I have.  I just found I like hardware keyboards live.   But again we are talking relatively small sonic quality differences for live classic rock. 

 

[Macsaint777]

I've gotta say...I used the XK-4 this past weekend for a large church event. Eight songs, and I used it on nearly every song. Both in the room, and in my in ears, it was really great even without the vent 2. I'm super happy with the adjustments I've made, and it seems to be a great board for live organ. 

 

 

[Mark Schmieder]

I hated all the software clones and got rid of all of them. Even if I liked them, I'd need a proper organ-action waterfall controller keyboard.

 

Last night, I made 19 more patches, mostly church organ style, and am floored by how good the pipe organ is in the XK-4. They even include a second one that is in the baroque tradition, but I'm not sure if it's a pump organ as it doesn't sound like one.

 

I have 17 more available slots that I will fill tonight. Most of them will be Continental and Farfisa, and the rest will be more pipe organ patches, unless I find the reed organ is so good in the XK-4 that I won't be needing the Arturia soft synths anymore.

 

As for patch storage, I think "setup" might be the full patch set, as I consulted the XK-1c manual last night. Not sure why the XK-4 manual is only half of a manual; it's not that it's more condensed, but rather, it is missing an awful lot of stuff altogether (including the MIDI spec). Maybe it was rushed? I guess I can check for a revised PDF later on.

[Mark Schmieder]

I finished filling the 100 slots last night. I only ported two Arturia Vox Continental patches, for songs I recorded, as almost all of those presets suck big time and have little to do with what the Continental is about. The same goes even more so for the Arturia Farfisa, but it's the wrong model anyway for porting to the XK-4, which I think is aiming for the FAST vs. the Combo. I almost wish I had retained the pre-Arturia version of those VI's, as the presets were organ-oriented instead of "let's emulate the Minimoog etc.".

 

I mostly added more jazz patches, but then made one specific patch for the Baroque Organ, using the bass pedals to lower keyboard. Once I tweaked things properly, it sounds even bigger than the modern pipe organ does, in many ways. Not as fond of the two Theatre Organs but don't generally like the real thing much either.

 

The Vox in the XK-4 isn't quite a Continental but is close. I guess there were variations over the years. At any rate, I'll find out this weekend whether it sounds better than the Arturia, based on the two very different patches I made. For the Farfisa, it's apples and oranges as the Arturia VI is a Combo with rocker switches vs. tonewheel drawbars.

 

I'm going through my jazz and rock band set lists tonight to see what might work, as the songs I practiced all week while making patches are not ones we are currently doing. If I had felt confident enough, I would have tried to make a Vox patch for George Harrison's "Think for Yourself".

[Aperkeys]

So... Should I sell my XK-5 and get the 4? My main use of it is for gigging, not recording sessions as much as I'd planned, and I'm always up for gear that weighs less. Also, I sold my Leslie 2101 so it's also a consideration...

[Mark Schmieder]

Certainly practical considerations often trump all others. I think the XK-5 has a truer keyboard but probably not a large difference compared to other factors. I too decided I am never going to need two manuals at a gig as I am not primarily a keyboardist and am getting too old to haul so much gear. I would've gone for the XK-5 otherwise.

 

Having not had a chance to compare them side by side, I don't know if you would lose anything important with the switch. I think Jim and others have done some basic summaries of XK-4 vs. XK-5, but it might not have been in this thread.

[Mark Schmieder]

Headphones are so revealing! Once I started recording last night, I immediately noticed that the default key click level is a gazillion times too high, and proceded to edit it on every personal patch, so far only getting through a couple dozen of them, so now I'll finish the rest before I go back to more recording takes.

 

I like key click to be very subtle and rarely triggered. The default setting is in-your-face with loud (and not terribly realistic) key click sounding on every note almost regardless of playing style and full key release or not. But I use a different setting on each patch, letting my ears be the judge. All patches default to 64 (out of 127).

 

As I have percussion turned off on most patches, I have not yet encountered the common complaint about that feature on this model, and I also don't use the Leslie all that much as most of my personal projects are more in the reggae/ska space, where I am going for the "bubble" and sometimes may use a bit of spring reverb and delay. I love Leslie cabinets but I like contrast, so I don't want every patch to use it.

[Mark Schmieder]

I've noticed an unusual feature on the XK-4: the power switch self-flips after a period of non-use.

 

I heard the click sound last night and noticed it was off, and wondered how that had happened, wondering if the cat had brushed past it.

 

But it happened again just now, and the cat is not in the room. I had turned it on to start editing patches, then got caught up on some research.

 

I suppose it's a good safety feature, and as the keyboard auto-saves, no risk of data loss, but I'm not sure I like this feature. 🙂

[kanefsky]

2 minutes ago, Mark Schmieder said:

I've noticed an unusual feature on the XK-4: the power switch self-flips after a period of non-use.

 

I heard the click sound last night and noticed it was off, and wondered how that had happened, wondering if the cat had brushed past it.

 

But it happened again just now, and the cat is not in the room. I had turned it on to start editing patches, then got caught up on some research.

 

I suppose it's a good safety feature, and as the keyboard auto-saves, no risk of data loss, but I'm not sure I like this feature. 🙂

 

[Mark Schmieder]

A busy afternoon, but worthwhile! I have now edited all 100 custom patches to fine-tune the key click, leakage, and (where relevant) the Leslie cabinet choice and percussion settings. I didn't edit EQ per patch as I'm not sure I'd want to bake in such settings as they most often need to tailor to a room, but I may change my mind during recording.

 

If anyone wants a copy of my setup file, let me know. I cover a much broader range of settings and styles than the factory patches.

[Mark Schmieder]

I got all my parts finessed and re-recorded last night, across seven album projects where I use electric organ sounds (I don't yet feature organ on ANY of my jazz tunes, but intend for that to change sometime this year). As hinted at earlier, my most extensive use of organ tends to be on reggae/ska/dub/calypso, but I use it on rock/pop/etc. too.

 

I was wrong about not using the Leslie on many patches. It gets confusing as the buttons are state-order dependent as opposed to other switches that always mean what they "say" with their current on/off status. It had been a while since I had worked with those buttons and I think having the CU-1 attached may be causing some firmware bugs in the XK-4, unless I am simply having a difficult time understanding why the order you press the buttons is so critical in determining whether Leslie is off or not.

 

Even so, I am not going to revisit the patches where "none of the Leslie button lights are on", to fine-tune which cabinet is in use, or other details of the Leslie on those patches. For most patches, I prefer the default setting (122 cabinet in normal characteristics setting), but I did switch a few to the other cabs or styles, for variety at least.

 

The actual truth is that I almost always find the slow Leslie more musical for MOST of my contexts, and also do not always like Chorus/Vibrato engaged at the same time (especially if fast Leslie is selected), but it's always case-by-case and I really did do a deep-dive on my 100 custom patches.

 

I can't imagine anyone using the Factory patches. What's interesting though, is that I think they correspond more to the XK-3 than the XK-1c, as some of them are similar to User Patches that I recreated and fine-tuned from my XK-3 when I ported THOSE patches to the XK-1c, which had entirely different preset banks.

 

One thing for sure, is that the user manual was rushed, so hopefully people who buy this keyboard later on, get a complete manual and one that has corrections. Lots of things are wrong in mine, and provably so, including the wrong numbers on diagrams vs. their descriptors, but stuff that is missing altogether keeps getting referenced as "see the User Manual for details". It's a bit strange, as my manual is inconsistently labeled as "User Manual" and as "Starter Guide".

 

Fortunately, I have an electronic copy of my XL-1c manual; so once that keyboard sells, I can keep referring to it for the gazillion things that are missing from the current initial version of the XK-4 manual, such as the MIDI spec and how to address the lower manual.

 

I bought a B-stock item, with a low serial number, so I wonder if anyone else on this forum who bought the XK-4 has a more up-to-date, corrected, and complete version, or maybe even two manuals (the "Starter Guide" and the actual "User Manual")?

[kanefsky]

https://www.hammondorgan.co.uk/_files/ugd/00ba44_2add9e5179cf46d288bde79f5e693c67.pdf

 

If you look at the bottom of the last page it says V1.00-20230509, presumably meaning that it's version 1.00 of the manual and was released on May 9 2023.

 

 

[Mark Schmieder]

I hinted at this earlier, but the Hammond XK-4 totally smokes the Arturia VOX Continental for emulating that combo organ's sound. I am no longer using the Arturia at all, and made custom patches on the XK-4 for all of my Continental needs.

 

I probably should have taken time to explore the Farfisa more, even though none of my current choices have drawbars vs. simple on/off rocker switches, so I didn't want to port those VI patches as it's apples vs. oranges. Nevertheless, I may find the Hammond a better fit, but for whatever reason, I find Arturia's Farfisa VI far superior to their Continental, even though both are essentially ports of that other guy's initially-free offerings. I think different teams were involved though.

 

I did some research on Farfisa's lines of organs and it seems that even the Professional model didn't have drawbars or non-binary settings for registers? The FAST model didn't, so I was wrong when I referenced that one earlier. I think Hammond-Suzuki is aiming for the Farfisa Pro on the XK-series.

[Mark Schmieder]

3 minutes ago, kanefsky said:

https://www.hammondorgan.co.uk/_files/ugd/00ba44_2add9e5179cf46d288bde79f5e693c67.pdf

 

If you look at the bottom of the last page it says V1.00-20230509, presumably meaning that it's version 1.00 of the manual and was released on May 9 2023.

 

 

 

Yep, that matches mine and has the same mistakes (e.g. the numbering of the Leslie buttons vs. their descriptors). I'll keep that link bookmarked though, as it may remain current for any updates to the manual. And actually mine says on the binding, "Startup Guide" (the SK-1c said "Owner's Manual"), but that won't show up in the PDF.

 

The XK-1c manual was over twice as long, and was English-only. I wonder if in combining the English and Japanese in one edition, they made a mistake on the overall page count? Probably not though, as the table of contents is correct. They probably plan to publish the other stuff on-line-only, as "not essential for everyday use".

[kanefsky]

7 minutes ago, Mark Schmieder said:

Yep, that matches mine and has the same mistakes (e.g. the numbering of the Leslie buttons vs. their descriptors). I'll keep that link bookmarked though, as it may remain current for any updates to the manual.

 

Probably the file at that URL will never change, so the better page to bookmark to look for updates would be this one:  https://www.hammondorgan.co.uk/download-hammond-owners-manuals

 

 

[Mark Schmieder]

52 minutes ago, kanefsky said:

 

Probably the file at that URL will never change, so the better page to bookmark to look for updates would be this one:  https://www.hammondorgan.co.uk/download-hammond-owners-manuals

 

 

 

Thanks, and I now remember that the UK site is where I grabbed my backups files and PDF's for the XK-1c. 🙂

[AnotherScott]

2 hours ago, Mark Schmieder said:

I did some research on Farfisa's lines of organs and it seems that even the Professional model didn't have drawbars or non-binary settings for registers? The FAST model didn't, so I was wrong when I referenced that one earlier. I think Hammond-Suzuki is aiming for the Farfisa Pro on the XK-series.

 

There's a bunch of info on Farfisa drawbar models at https://www.combo-organ.com/Farfisa/VIP/index.htm - my first portable organ was their VIP 345.

 

1 hour ago, Mark Schmieder said:

The XK-1c manual was over twice as long, and was English-only.

 

There were a lot more user accessible settings in that one, too.

[Mark Schmieder]

23 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:

 

There's a bunch of info on Farfisa drawbar models at https://www.combo-organ.com/Farfisa/VIP/index.htm - my first portable organ was their VIP 345.

 

 

There were a lot more user accessible settings in that one, too.

 

Hah, the previous articles I had found only had the super tiny photos, and I assumed the color blocks were rocker switches. Your article has some closeups, and now I see that they are simply weirdly designed drawbars! Arturia did model a rocker switch model though. Not Hammond, apparently.

[ob1]

On 7/15/2023 at 12:13 PM, Thomas Korthals said:

...

Nobody can really tell us what the difference between MTW and MTW2 is regarding hardware, software, etc.

...

That's what really sucks - someone in the know, PLEASE tells us what the difference is (beyond that MTW2 is all modelled - I'm sure you can appreciate that , the modelled explanation is not helpful)

 

I've been in the market for a 2 manual XK-5.  I (recently) looked into SK-ProX, and it gave me pause as I can get one for even cheaper and get a lot more with it.  Without knowing if there will be updates to the XK-5 or an XK-5 mk2, it's really hard to chose.

The reason why I like the XK-5 is the "traditional" form factor.  I have a Nord Stage 3 so not sure how helpful the SK ProX would be.  However, I would get rid of the Nord if I truly believed the SK-ProX would replace it.  I had a VR-730 and a YC-61 and as much as I actually liked the YC-61, neither of those replace the Nord - not even close.

[analogman1]

I had asked a similar question on another thread. 
Hammond seems to blur the lines between their product specs and this makes it really tough to compare them. 
 

I wonder how the B3 section of the XKpro compares with thw XK4c. 
I’m not stuck on having “multi contacts” or anything else like that. 

[AnotherScott]

22 minutes ago, ob1 said:

have a Nord Stage 3 so not sure how helpful the SK ProX would be.  However, I would get rid of the Nord if I truly believed the SK-ProX would replace it.  I had a VR-730 and a YC-61 and as much as I actually liked the YC-61, neither of those replace the Nord - not even close.

 

The Hammond will similarly not replace the Nord, at least in terms of pianos, custom sample loading, and aftertouch. Though the Hammond can do some non-organ tricks that the Nord cannot... velocity switching of samples/sounds, fully adjustable split points, up to 10 total split/layered sounds (4 sections, but two of the sections can, themselves, contain up to 4 sounds).

[Mark Schmieder]

All I can say is that this is my fifth virtual tonewheel organ, and to my ears it is the biggest upgrade yet in terms of organic character, versatility, and three dimensionality.

 

VK7->XK1->XK3->XK1c->XK4.

[ob1]

What's making it particularly tough for me is that I am REALLY liking the various demos of the XK-4!  If a second manual will be available, I'm in.  However if someone can confirm the XK-5 sounds exactly the same, I'll get that for the dual manual and traditional form factor.

[Macsaint777]

On 4/12/2024 at 6:44 PM, ob1 said:

What's making it particularly tough for me is that I am REALLY liking the various demos of the XK-4!  If a second manual will be available, I'm in.  However if someone can confirm the XK-5 sounds exactly the same, I'll get that for the dual manual and traditional form factor.

XK-5 doesn't sound as good to me. Nor is it as easy to adjust things. Leslie is not as good either. 

[Mark Schmieder]

17 hours ago, Macsaint777 said:

XK-5 doesn't sound as good to me. Nor is it as easy to adjust things. Leslie is not as good either. 

 

Interesting to hear. I've never had a chance to play an XK-5, and I don't remember what Jim said about the differences (might be on a different thread.

[analogman1]

I’m interested as well. 
Hammond is really vague, in my opinion. 

[ob1]

18 hours ago, analogman1 said:

I’m interested as well. 
Hammond is really vague, in my opinion. 

I've decided I'm going to wait either until the next version of the XK5 or the next version of the SKX Pro.  Bummer it will likely be years!

 

[Mark Schmieder]

12 hours ago, ob1 said:

I've decided I'm going to wait either until the next version of the XK5 or the next version of the SKX Pro.  Bummer it will likely be years!

 

 

I'm too old to wait that long! 🙂

[funkyhammond]

Anyone know about the XK-4 sending high/shallow trigger notes over MIDI if the internal sound is set to trigger "shallow"? I just thought I would add it to the "high trigger" list of boards on that thread since I was recently updating it anyway.

 

@Mark Schmieder since you've done so much digging into the XK-4 and also mentioned recording with it, I was wondering if you might already know. I don't know if you record MIDI along with audio. 

 

For those of us that do like recording MIDI along with audio, recording organs can be weird if the internal sound is triggering on the high key contact but the sent MIDI is on the low key contact. The SK/SKX Pro boards do not send high trigger over MIDI but that's probably just because they are multi-timbral boards that have to deal with organs and velocity sensitive sounds being mixed in layers/splits. (Same thing applies to the multi-timbral Nords.)

 

I have the XK-1c listed as sending high trigger over MIDI but no confirmation about the XK-3c or XK-5. If anyone also knows about those, let me know. Thanks!