Hi Diki.

For years you have been saying how bad it sounds and complaining how nobody can upload a quality demo and that there must be a reason why, blaming the keyboard. Now I get one and you say ......”why is anyone astounded at how good the sounds can be?”...... all of a sudden.

Regarding PC's, yes you could run Gigasampler and VSTi's on your PC for years, but that does not in anyway compare to an OPEN Keyboard. A PC does not come with a Custom OS, dedicated buttons for controlling every single application on it and so on, let alone the form factor of a musical instrument and the clean workspace environment you get from such a system.

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James has still not even scratched the surface of how to turn this thing into an arranger, the workload we would all face to do that, and tweak the styles to a level noticeably better than a decent TOTL arranger. And, in all fairness, this being an ARRANGER forum, not a virtual instrument one (plenty of those with VERY knowledgeable members if anyone cares to look), I am still rather more concerned with the MS's application as an arranger than a VSTi playback machine.


While I have not yet looked at this system, I can say that there is automatically a certain amount of instant compatibility here. Any style you load is going to have a certain level of GM/GS compatibility by default and they will be automatically connected to the GS/GM Giga Library that comes with the keyboard. So I don't expect this to be complicated at all when I get to it.

I would imagine it's a simple matter of just adjusting volumes of the tracks and changing a sound or two to better Giga sound I feel might work better. Sounds pretty simply when you say it, so we will see how things go when I get around to it which will be VERY soon.

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I am still wondering just what percentage of members here, once they finally understand the degree of knowledge you need (James makes it look easy, but he has YEARS of experience with VSTi's and computer rigs to call upon) to make all this stuff happen, are anything more than just academically interested in this thing?


There's no requirement to use VSTi's to make it sound better than a closed keyboard from day one. Out of the box the core sounds are provided by Giga files so there's no setup to use these. You press a single button and an entire GM/GS library of sounds is displayed on the screen to select just like you select a sound on a closed keyboard. So users can very much so live off Giga files for a long time and learn how to use the other parts of the keyboard at their own pace.

Some people might never even feel the need go past Giga files because you can get some pretty mind blowing sounds for very little money if you look at AKAI disks.

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This is an amazing keyboard, but don't fool yourselves. It only will sound its' best in the hands of someone intimately familiar with computer music production, like James (definitely NOT like anyone Dom has ever hired to demo it!), and just how many of us really think we fit that bill?


I would hope from the Video's and their very simply nature and approach that people can see that it was very easy for me to assign sounds to slots the screen.
1: Press EIDT
2: Navigate to the file you want the same way you naviage on a PC.
3: Press enter to load a sound.
4: If you like it and you want to use it, touch the slot where you want to put it and press insert.

Exit...... that's all.

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BTW, if those winds are out for Akai S1000, those samples easily fit the much larger RAM sizes of a T3 or PA2Xpro (or quite possibly the Audya, too)... Don't forget, quite a few of you already HAVE the technology to play many of these kinds of sounds in what you have NOW. If you haven't availed yourself of the opportunity to use the technology in what you currently own, what makes you think that you are likely to want to do even MORE work to make an even MORE complex keyboard like this do them?


That's not entirely true.

Yamaha arrangers does not support any know sample format that contains mulstisample data. Ketron are also the same, plus the Audya only has 64MB of RAM (lol...what a joke). KORG on the other hand, fair enough, they will even read raw AKAI data straight off a CD but you still have to load everything to RAM and a Pa2X maxed out will give you 256MB. The piano sound I was using was over 500MB

Regards
James

[This message has been edited by Irishacts (edited 03-22-2010).]