I haad some time at my hands and visited a local music shop for a free cup of coffee a nice talk and a headset to play some of their instruments..

I ended up playing with the pa4x, which is a beast indeed. i noticed that when having a left hand sound and a right hand sound and no bass part running, you can use single notes in your left hand to play a basic single note basspattern/beat with the base note of the chord you are holding.. very nice feature.

also the manuall bass feature is quite nice. Just drums and bass in the left, and solo instruments in the right. Very usefull.

I also dived into some edditing of sounds, after finding that Most DNC sounds by default are set to Polyphonic play.. where i wanted a monphonic sound with legato swtiched on.. as i was trying to recreate a real sax sound.. i loved the edittabillity of the PA4x sounds, just push the sounds option and go ahead and eddit your sounds and save them under their own name under user. However i also found that most sounds are tweaked in such a way, that they sound as best as possible, and edditing most of the time leads to loosing soundquallity.


I then moved to the other interesting instrument they had on display. A Roland Fa06, lovely instrument. Yet when i plugged my headset in it immediately was clear that it sounded way less then the pa4x, something i did not expect, it also sounded way less then the integra7.. and i found someone had played with all the system wide parameters in such a way that it sounded realy frail and thin..

Luckilly Roland sound is hugely edditable, and in a few minutes i had addapted the sound to my preferences. I ended up playing with the drums and the arpeggiator, and ending up with an hour of fun. I just love tweaking arpegio´s and the Roland one seems to outshine the Yamaha arps in MOXF which are mostly based on static midi patterns.

Anyone else here loving oldfashioned arpeggiators?



in the end i need to confess, that visiting music stores and playing with the new toys out there is one of my favourite passtimes, makes me feel like that little kid in the toystore again..