I've just received my first Generalmusic Pro Mega 3 Piano this week and the opinion so far is that this is the best sounding, feeling and easy to use piano my piano playing customers and employees have ever played or listened to. The feel, large sliders and volume pots, and ease of use of the 4 sections is just awsome. The technology which created this instrument is a newly designed chip by Gem call "DRAKE". Drake makes it possible to increase polyphony, sample sounds, develop physical modeling for sound creation, add effects.....basically everything can be programmed into a DRAKE chip. It's memory capacity is huge.
What Gem did is to create acoustic piano sounds using samples and combining physical modeling in the dynamics and harmonics as well as in damper physical modeling and in the case of the Rhodes, Wurliter Piano and Clavinet, they have used 100% physical modeling to create these sounds. The four sections include Pianos, Vintage Keyboards, Basses and other sounds including Strings, Brass, choir, etc. Each section is exactly the same with a Volume slider, two effects processors, to left button (for splits) and on and off button for up to 4 layers. When you call up one of the 128 performance memories you see all the rotary pots move to light up the selected sounds and the volume slider physically moves to the programmed volume and the graphic equalizer has red lights which show exactly where the adjustments were made. You can also lock the eq so not to move between performances. This is truly a work of art and although when I first saw this at the NAMM show in February, I really didn't spend any time with this product because I was only looking at Genesys, I must tell you, if I had a studio and had to have the best Acoustic Piano, Rhodes, etc. and a great 88 key hammer action graded keyboard, and I could spend about $2500.00, this would be it. Couple this with a Ketron XD3 arranger module or the X4 or a Generalmusic WK2 arranger, and you could have the ultimate set up if you didn't want to take it around to much. The Pro Mega 3 is big, but boy is it worth it when you touch the rotary knobs and large faders. I know most of you will not see this because there are few Generalmusic dealers around the country, but if you could, it's worth a drive to your nearest dealer.
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene