After having played on it at home for about a week, here are my personal observations:


PLUS:


1. Superb Construction, no plastics
2. Very good keybed
3. Excellent touchscreen
4. Many really good sounds/samples
5. Very good acoustic piano
6. Impressive Audio Drums
7. Equally impressive drum breaks and fill ins
8. Lots of stuff not yet unearthed by me

MINUS:

.
1
STYLES
Not all that many onboard (256) and rather monotonous and repetitive imho. Often using the same acoustic guitar in the acc. Sections 1 and 2, an acoustic guitar not even that impressive. Piano Bossa (Unpluggged section) is an excellent example of this. Only the first acc. Track is being used throughout the style.



2 CERTAIN SOUNDS/SAMPLES. Not too convincing trumpet, brass and even the ac. guitars


3 Operating System. A true nightmare if you want to do some signficant Inn-depth tweaking and programming. It basically all goes back to the original Soltons ( 1995) but as these machines have become so much more complicated there seems to be little logic in the built-up of the O.S.



4 AUDIO DRUMS

The strenght of its great Audio drums strangely enough also constitutes its weakness in that virtually all the styles in the SD7 use the audio drums thus making it impossible to intervene with the Drum Mixer, a great tool in previous models. Of course the Drum Mixer can be used in older styles and imho you should be able to replace the audio drums by midi drums if so desired, but so far I have been unable to do so.




5 REVERB ON DRUMS
Even with the reverb set to zero all audio drums retain a certain degree of reverb which the manufacturer will dub as “ natural “ or “ambient “ , but personally I like to be able to remove reverb to my liking.






6 USER STYLES

When replacing certain sounds in the acc. Tracks you meet with the following problems. For instance, let us assume you want to replace the guitars in acc. One and acc. 2 by acoustic piano. After having brought about these changes things sound just the way I want them to. Then I proceed to save the new ‘user style ‘.
Sof ar so good. However on selecting the new user style again things go horribly wrong in that the two new piano tracks are played two or three octaves too high.
No means on the instrument to adjust this, there is no TUNE function in the style department in as far as I have been able to discover.




7 VOICE EDIT

It takes nothing short of a miracle even to find out where and how you can tweak the voices….Nevertheless once you have done so and save the new voice as a user voice you are not able to use any of these user voices in any accompaniment track of the styles. In this way it resembles Yamaha and unlike Korg where you can do so to your heart’s content.



8 E.Q.
While you can adjust the right hand voices in the editing section with EQ Parameters all tracks in the style section have no EQ parameters. Of course there is an overall EQ setting at the end of the chain for the entire instrument
which is also limited in its capabilities but as I said no EQ on the acc. Tracks.
As Don suggested there is a way around this which boils down to the fact that you can simultaneously open the FILTER for all the acc. Tracks a little further.The effect is similar but obviously different from a real EQ setting….




This is how far I have gotten with the Ketron SD7 and it looks like it is not going to be my next arranger keyboard. Though I have dwelled on the negative aspects
I would like to add that for those who are not given to indepth tweaking and home recording it is an excellent keyboard. The characterists that I mentioned on the outset speak for themselves. I have heard the recordings and performances by Deane and Don, as you all have, and all I can say is that the instrument does them real credit. But for me………..I guess the new Korg is lurking in the wings one day

regards
John Smies