I have not posted since the crash until today when I found I had been reinstated. I did not have much new to say anyway, but now I have test-driven and purchased a Korg KARMA and I thought some comments would be of interest here.

As background, I have a PSR-8000. It is great to have autoaccompaniment and thousands of styles on the net to choose from. However, I find all the styles too confining, I get tired of them easily. I was looking for a way to allow for realtime continuous control of an arranger, and consider buying a Roland MC-505 groove machine to combine with an arranger. However, I think the combination would be cumbersome.

So Yesterday, I played the KARMA. It does have chord recognition! This was not apparent from the write ups, but it recognizes chords, distinguishes inversions and voicings. It does not seem to recognize rootless chord voicings, but I have reason to believe that the chord recognition is programable, so this might be taken care of.

The Karma uses "Generated Effects" instead of styles. There are called that because the patterns are generated as you play, rather than predetermined except for the transposition, as on most arrange keyboards. There are no intro, variation, ending, fill, etc. buttons. However you can adjust everything in real time so the possible variations are much more extensive than with an arranger.

Referring to the generated effects as styles anyway, there are 1000 on board. Many are dance-groove oriented, which are not my favorite. Others are orchestral. I do not think there are many bread and butter styles for gigging musicians, especially if they take requests. However, there are some great acoustic guitar styles. I think new age is covered well. However, ballroom is poorly represented.

The sounds. This is a Triton minus the sampler (and the arpeggiator, but who cares). If you like Triton sounds, you will like this. It also take the MOSS option and TRITON ROM expansions. It comes with 32MB expandable to 64MB. To my ear, the Roland XV-5080 sounds more "real" and more evocative to me, the Karma sounds are more "edgy". Of course, the Roland expansion options are much more extensive than the Triton; but the Triton library is expanding.

User Friendliness. Arranger keyboards are made to be user friendly. In fact, they are made so that it is difficult to sound bad. This is not true of the Karma. With so much continuous control available, there are lots of non-musical (to my ear) settings. Just as you can get bad sounds out of any deep synth, you can get bad styles out of this deep arranger. Also, it can be hard to repeat something you have done before, because you many not remember what position all the continuous controllers were in and what changes you made in real time. It is not like having a set of registration buttons.

KARMA converts MIDI notes and control changes to more complex series of notes. You can enter the notes from the keyboard, or from a remote keyboard or sequencer. It might work well with alternate controllers, such as a Yamaha WX-5 wind controller. The KARMA MIDI data can be output from the keyboard, so it can be used to drive other sound modules and it can be recorded in an external sequener, although the internal sequencer is quite good I understand.

There is a floppy disk, but no hard disk. However, program storage is ample.

I would like to see vocal harmony integrated into a karma workstation. Also, it seems there could be a Generated Effect that would serve as a style template. PSR styles, for example, could be converted for use on the Karma, with realtime control added. However, this is just speculation.

Karma came about as a platform for helping to develop styles and demo sequences. Instead of just using the results, the author, Stephen Kay, basically incorporated the development environment in the keyboard. An analogous contrast would be between a word processing program (like an arranger) and a programming language (like the Karma) that comes with a few templates.

In summary, this is a deep arranger. This is not one to take out of the package to a gig and wing it. However, for those who want autoaccompaniment but find conventional arrangers too confining, the KARMA is certainly worth exploring.

Clif