Keytar with 6/7 octaves and 2 midi outs? Exist? Possible?

[goldphinga]

I was thinking about something like this today. Would love a long scale keytar with 2 midi outs with a splittable keyboard so i could trigger my nord stage for the top 4 octaves and trigger my moog phatty on the lower octaves..

 

[MikeyParent]

A 7 octave keytar? Seriously? The AX-Synth is a full 4 and that thing looks massive. I could not imagine something that is larger by nearly double.

 

Firstly - Keytars are mostly for one-handed playing - leads and basic chording. So you could only realistically trigger one of the boards at a time anyways. Any decent keytar has a an upper/lower or split function so you could flip between them on the fly. If you have to play bass and leads at the same time that often, they keytar is not really the right controller...

 

Secondly - Two midi outs would not only be incredibly cumbersome - bad enough being tethered by one midi cable, let alone two - its completely unnecessary. Just midi the Nord and Moog together - they will have to listen on different channels anyways.

[AnotherScott]

As far as I know, the biggest boards designed as keytars have been 4 octaves. But you could probably rig up a way to strap on anything that's light enough for you to manage. Edgar Winter used to wear a 5 octave Univox piano, among other things.

 

You don't need two MIDI Outs. A single MIDI jack can address up to 16 devices (which is why you don't generally see devices with multiple MIDI outs). What you would need is for the keyboard itself to have a split function that allows you to transmit on a different MIDI channel on either side of the split (and there are plenty of those). Then you go out of your controller into the MIDI IN of the first device you want to control, and then run another cable from the MIDI THRU of that device to the MIDI IN of the second device you want to control. If neither of the two devices you want to control have a MIDI THRU jack, then you need to add a 1-in, at-least-2-out MIDI THRU box (essentially, a MIDI splitter). It used to be that pretty much all MIDI devices had THRU jacks, but they've gotten a bit more rare lately. Sometimes a device has an option that allows you to configure its MIDI OUT jack to be a a MIDI THRU jack, though.

 

The lightest 5-octave board to try something like this with would be the Korg Microstation, which is very compact because of its mini-keys. It would also work well because you could program its 16 patch selection buttons to call up various combinations of sounds on your Stage and Phatty.

 

The lightest larger board is probably the Yamaha NP-30/31 at 76 keys. But that would require some additional external device(s) and/or configuration since it doesn't provide for splitting its board to two MIDI channels, nor much facility for calling up presets, but there are ways to address these shortcomings, it just gets a bit more complicated. External boxes and foot pedals, for example.

 

The Stage (at least the Stage 2) has enough of its own MIDI splitting and routing functionality that there may be other solutions as well... you may be able to wire it up differently and set it up in such a way that you don't need the controlling keyboard itself to be able to generate the split at all.

[the_big_e]

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[JeffLearman]

Even Edgar sticks to 4 or 5 octaves ...

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But you could put a strap on a Privia PX-3 and go for it.