Hi folks. I finally got my first arranger. Yippee!! It's a WK8 Megastation. Lots to learn and so far so good. Sound nice and plays sequences I've created in Cakewalk quit nicely. Any ways, the question I have for you all is this. I would like to change fills, variations, etc using a foot pedal. Just don't have enough hands to use the buttons. Does anyone here use a pedalboard/foot pedal with your arranger to trigger fills, variations and such? What are your experiances doing this. Any problems hitting the wrong pedal and going to the wrong variation during a performance? Any other options or ideas would be welcome. Thanks, Vic Shanor AKA musicman.

Hi Vic01,

Congratulations on your new WK8. Did you get the WK8 or the new WK8-SE (special edition)? I heard that the WK8-SE includes the awesome acoustic piano sample from the GEM PRO2. Either way, I'm sure you are going to love your new keyboard for many years to come.

Because I continously need to be playing my arranger keyboard (Technics KN5000) with BOTH hands, the foot pedal route is the ONLY way to go. I use a four pedal unit model plus a single pedal unit mounted to the side. They are mounted to a platform (thin plywood) which is in turn secured to my keyboard stand's legs. This insures that the pedal unit does not slide/change position while playing and insures that the foot pedals are always in the EXACT same location. This allows you to easily memorize the foot locations without without looking. I setup my foot pedals to trigger fills, panel memory settings, and intros & endings. To avoid accidently pressing the wrong pedal, try to set the foot controller pedal assigments consistently for all songs.

Scott http://scottyee.com

Thanks for your reply Scott. My WK8 is the non-se. I got it locally here in Madison, Wisconsin. I just uploaded the new OS which is supposed to give it the ability to read directly from floppy rather than wait to load to ram. I'll check that out hopefully tonight sometime. The WK8 has I think 4 pedal inputs on the rear plus a dedicated pedalbaord input for the 13 note dynamic pedalboard from GEM. Of course they want 300+ bucks for the pedalboard but it does seem like a cool solution. I take it you can assign different functions to your seperate pedals and get similar results that way. I have one pedal unit so if I pick another 3 and mount them all to some plywood, I might be good to go. There's a whole section in the manual on configuring the pedal inputs so I guess I should do some more reading.

[This message has been edited by Vic01 (edited 03-08-2001).]

Hey Vic,

I've been a GeneralMusic keyboard player for sometime now (Bachman, WX2, WK4, and now WK8). I still have the 3-switch foot pedals I got with my Bachman and have used them on all keyboards mentioned above. They are the small, square shaped pedals, 3-in-a-row style. I have the volume (expression) pedal somewhere but haven't used that in quite some time. The 3-pedal setup works great. For the most part, I have them programmed for one variation back, one variation forward, and fill. But switching between Harmony or Rotary S/F is truely helpful. I guess it just depends on what song you're playing. Granted, the pedals are a little small, in other words, I have stepped on 2 pedals at once (big feet?) but I've gotten use to it over the years (read, practice). At home, I always play with my shoes off, no problems then. If it was me designing them, I would have made them into the shape of regular piano pedals. I'm sure you can find those type somewhere?? Hope this helps.

mike



[This message has been edited by msutliff (edited 03-08-2001).]

Thanks Mike. The 3 pedal solution sounds like a go for me. Granted the pedalboard option can do it all but that will have to wait for a while. One variation forward, one variation back and fill. I think I've got it.