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Rant : With all hyper technological advances, In the keyboard world we still have ..


minimoog

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We sent robot's to mars,computers are a million times faster than 30 years ago,
etc etc etc etc . But in the keyboard world we still don't get past or have _________?


A good controller with a good piano feel,get past the 128 polyphony, or a good responsive wind controller, a real b3 emulation .. etc


now your own.....



and why with all the advancedments we don't have some simple answers to some of the problems in the keyboard world?

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I once heard that if the field of medicine had developed at the same rate that computer technology has, we wouldn't have cancer, or AIDS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.

I'm thinking a lightweight B3 copy controller with an 88-key weighted action controller on top, full pedalbard option underneath, and two 27" monitors side by side controlling an advanced computer system with any VST or DAW you want.

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The Kronos has lots of polyphony. In CX-3 mode (Hammond clone) for example , the poyphony is 400. It's amazing. Hold the sustain pedal down, run your hand over all the keys and listen to the cacophony of all notes playing at once.

Bryan

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This is like the "what gear do I need to get for more/better paying gigs" thread. The problem with technology in music isn't the technology, it's the music. Good music is just hard to make and even harder to rate. What sounds great to me at 2:30 in the morning after a bottle and a half of merlot sends my wife, kids, and dogs running for Gangnam Style the next day. A better V-piano would make me compettive with Chopin. The new boards (and software) are so complicated that they are almost unusable by amatures but when the iPad came along and gave "pro quality" loopsets to the masses for $4.99 everyone started to complain about the plethora of crap music. I can do far more with each of my keyboards now than I could with my Ensoniq 25 years ago but they all still sound like me and when I hear recordings from that old machine I marvel at how full the sound was and kick myself for ever letting it go.

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Quote Originally Posted by minimoog View Post
Well yea but more models with Poly At only the VAX thing and the new Rodhes
BTW if the Vax77 is so good ,why i don't see it more with the Pros?
It isn't cheap, and we live in {censored}ty economic times.

If I had to name the keyboards I've seen the most with today's modern bands, I would pick the Korg Microkorg (cheap!) and the Moog Little Phatty (not cheap! But... um... retro?)
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Good controllers are hard to find.

I had a $600 Remote 61. The keybed was the only thing nice about it. The rest of it was made of cheap creaky plastic. The "Auto"map feature only seemed to work with my Waldorf Edition plug-ins. The rest had to be manually set-up even though there were presets for it, they never worked. I'm sorry, but part of the reason I paid a premium for that particular controller was so I didn't have to program all the controls myself!

Replaced it with an AKAI MPK-49 which was a much nicer build quality but I REALLY didn't like the keybed, so I returned it. I got so sick of hunting for a quality keyboard controller that I gave up, sold a **** ton of synths (including the Mopho) and bought a C-Thru Music AXiS-64. Talk about an achievement. That's one of the best things that ever happened for keyboard players, yet 99.9% of them don't even know it. Yes, it was bloody expensive, and yes I had to totally relearn how to play but I was never classically trained in the first place. Plus, it's built like a tank and I absolutely LOVE the harmonic table keyboard WAY better anyways. My music is so much more.... umm.... musical, I guess is the word I'm looking for.

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+1 to what Plaid said about keyboard controllers. Agreed, the ReMOTE SL has a nice keyboard, but everything else is exactly as described. For the premium, it should have been built better. Or, franky, I WOULD have paid a leeeetle more if it meant a better quaility case and controls.

/rant

Otherwise, I don't agree with Mini... The stuff we have this day in age is lightyears beyond what was available only 10 or 20 years prior. I suspect that what MM is really whining about is that all the high-end features can't be had for a buck-fiddy.

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Quote Originally Posted by ElectricPuppy View Post
...Otherwise, I don't agree with Mini... The stuff we have this day in age is lightyears beyond what was available only 10 or 20 years prior. I suspect that what MM is really whining about is that all the high-end features can't be had for a buck-fiddy.
Not to mention we (rock keyboardists) are a bit of a niche market. Especially if you narrow it down to those willing to pay for a quality product. The market dictates.

Having said that, I'm quite content with what's available today. Considering what we used to haul touring in the '70's and into the 80's. Leslies, pianos and such. No complaints here. My 'big' rig fits in an SUV and the small set-up fits in a small car. No rant from me on what's become state of the art these days.
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Quote Originally Posted by ElectricPuppy View Post
Otherwise, I don't agree with Mini... The stuff we have this day in age is lightyears beyond what was available only 10 or 20 years prior. I suspect that what MM is really whining about is that all the high-end features can't be had for a buck-fiddy.
The last track I created involved a bit over 50 DAW tracks, with several instances of quite decent sounding orchestral libraries like Cinematic Strings and Spitfire Albion. The DAW is $60, and while the orchestral libraries (a few hundred each) are not the cheapest thing...

...thirty years ago, for recording an equivalent level, we would be talking about the $100K+ equivalent large format consoles and 24 track to even come close (we could argue about analog vs DAW about sound, but the expensive tape / console setup does not have the flexibility or even the track count of the DAW, with its infinite routing and submixing capabilities).

Thirty years ago, there was no equivalent of a Spitfire Albion, period. Your samplers were the super-pricey Synclavier and Fairlight, with the "budget" $8000 (1982 dollars) Emulator also around. These extremely expensive tools could... well, they could make grungy-sounding "orchestra hits". icon_lol.gif 20 years ago, the golden standard for orchestral sounds was the Kurzweil K2000 with the orchestra ROM, nice for its time, but just comparing the sounds with the demos of any decent modern library should show a *lot* of difference.

Also, as far as B3 emulations go, the OP clearly has not heard the Neo Ventilator.

Controllers are indeed a sore spot, though.
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Quote Originally Posted by guido61 View Post
I suspect the technology exists, but that not enough people are willing to pay for it to make it financially feasible for any company to produce. People don't want to pay more than $500 for a controller and then bitch that it doesn't have the action of a $40,000 Steinway. idn_smilie.gif
And that is the core of the problem.

I bought my Kurzweil MIDIBoard brand new for $1700 back in 1989. In those days good controllers were made and people paid for that quality.

I'm always disappointed when today's controllers don't have the feel and features of my MB. They're nowhere near as sturdy and rugged either. And with cheap manufacturing and cutthroat competition abound, the market no longer exists for a decent controller.

Is my MB obsolete? It doesn't implement 14-bit NRPNs but there are hardware add-ons for that. I am happy with my MB and it doesn't need to do EVERYTHING.

The people who bitch about price are reaping what they sowed.
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Quote Originally Posted by guido61

View Post

I suspect the technology exists, but that not enough people are willing to pay for it to make it financially feasible for any company to produce. People don't want to pay more than $500 for a controller and then bitch that it doesn't have the action of a $40,000 Steinway. idn_smilie.gif

 

the extra $35k is for the strings and fancy case
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Quote Originally Posted by The Real MC View Post
And that is the core of the problem.

I bought my Kurzweil MIDIBoard brand new for $1700 back in 1989. In those days good controllers were made and people paid for that quality.

I'm always disappointed when today's controllers don't have the feel and features of my MB. They're nowhere near as sturdy and rugged either. And with cheap manufacturing and cutthroat competition abound, the market no longer exists for a decent controller.

Is my MB obsolete? It doesn't implement 14-bit NRPNs but there are hardware add-ons for that. I am happy with my MB and it doesn't need to do EVERYTHING.

The people who bitch about price are reaping what they sowed.
I, too, love my MIDIBoard. But it is showing its age. I need to go in and re-solder one slider (replaced 5 years ago, I'm assuming a cold solder joint). And I find the action 'hard' in the sense that it hits the sensor with more clack than thump and the keys bounce or double-send as a result--especially when I'm playing delicately. Any suggestions? It's the USA action.
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Quote Originally Posted by guido61 View Post
I suspect the technology exists, but that not enough people are willing to pay for it to make it financially feasible for any company to produce. People don't want to pay more than $500 for a controller and then bitch that it doesn't have the action of a $40,000 Steinway. idn_smilie.gif
I actually haven't looked at the digital piano market, but I wonder if there are some decent feeling controllers in that category that are hiding from us synth players. Digital pianos with real hammers for instance exist now, for those who demand the utmost realism in hammer action. icon_lol.gif

They obviously won't have the controller features of the DAW purpose keyboards, and probably more primitive MIDI, but maybe there's a few gems that are better than the plastic crap.

I do see a lot of plastic crap even in the "hammer action" category that probably is no better than the VMK-161 controller I have (pretty good feeling controller, cheaply made, buggy software).
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I have a Prophet 08 and Moog LP. Why do these instruments have tiny little LCD screens that display what... 24 or 36 characters? And have 128 user programs? These "modern day" analog synths still look and act like they have 80's technology in them.

Ditto for my MOX6. Same dinky LCD screen. I understand it is a poor man's Motif XS, but are larger screens really that much more expensive? And only 128 user patch memories?

My little iPhone seems to have 1,000x the computing power and technology that is found in so many keyboards.

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Yup. The only time this is acceptable is when you have editing software for the computer, and even then it's only mildly acceptable in this day and age. There's NO excuse for manufacturers to be using little two line displays on complex instruments like the Prophet 08 and Virus TI. They should be much larger, color displays and touchscreen would be nice for certain instruments. And even on the compact instruments, why can't they use a small color display with a higher resolution? Even $40 MP3 players have a nicer screen than my TI desktop, and they've been around at that price for years.

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In 1988 a state-of-the-art PC had 4MB of memory, and a state-of-the-art drum machine had enough memory for 50,000 notes. Today my PC has 8GB of memory (2000x more than 1988), yet a state-of-the-art workstation keyboard has memory for 128,000 notes (about 2x more than 1988). How much more would it cost Yamaha / Korg / whoever to put in enough non-volatile memory to hold more than about 40 songs (i.e. more than 1 MB)? mad.gif (Props to Casio at least for giving us a decent 16MB of sequence memory smile.gif).

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Yamaha and other manufacturers came to the conclusion that "most" players only used internal sequencers to create scratch songs so they could remember them or rough them out before using a DAW for any serious recording work. Why put hardware into a keyboard that most players weren't going to use? All that does is drive up the cost in a very competitive market.

I still have my Yamaha ES8 and when I was still actively playing gigs I did my entire show using the internal sequencer memory. Classic rock songs are not all memory hogs and if you clean up each track when you are about finished with it to make sure it was clean and not using up memory unnecessarily, you can get the most efficient use of what you have on-board. Provided I planned a good mix of fast dance tunes and a few slow tunes that requried strings, horns, and a lot of different instruments, I could put together a one hour set with just a little planning. I would load up a new set before I went on break so I was ready to go. I got in the habit of erasing songs I had played previoiusly after I did about 5 songs, while the crowd was catching its breath. I never ran out of memory never had much trouble getting through the night without a hitch. My ES8 worked flawlessly and sounded great considering the time period I bought it and all the years I used it for live shows.

Obviously, dealing with limitations takes your eye off the ball, but if you have reasonable limitions you can worth with, your KB won't cost you an extra $1000 because you had to pay for things you didn't need.



Cheers!


Mike T.

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Oops, plaid_emu, thanks for reminding me about the Virus TI... I have one of those, too. Same dinky, crappy little screen.

Kudos to Korg for putting large screens on instruments like the M50, and a large COLOR screen on the $999 Krome 61. Apparently it IS possible.... Let's see the other manufacturers follow suit.

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The small "green screen" on my ES8 was a major complaint I had with that KB, but it did prove to be OK for how I used it. But I'm with you guys, a large color screen is better than a small mono screen, especially at my age!


Cheers!


Mike T.

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Quote Originally Posted by JimboKeys View Post
In 1988 a state-of-the-art PC had 4MB of memory, and a state-of-the-art drum machine had enough memory for 50,000 notes. Today my PC has 8GB of memory (2000x more than 1988), yet a state-of-the-art workstation keyboard has memory for 128,000 notes (about 2x more than 1988). How much more would it cost Yamaha / Korg / whoever to put in enough non-volatile memory to hold more than about 40 songs (i.e. more than 1 MB)? mad.gif (Props to Casio at least for giving us a decent 16MB of sequence memory smile.gif).
The computer industry definitely has far more resources available for developing and exploiting electronic hardware than the music industry does.

I guess this is why Korg decided for Kronos / Oasys to actually use a computer. I'm sure Kronos's 2GB of memory can hold a few more than 128K notes?
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