Hi!
I have been away from the forum now for a while. I stopped visiting when the board went down. But now it seems to be back stronger than ever, so I also want to come back stronger than ever!
I am a keyboardist since 18 years and have grown up with synths and keyboards. I have tried a lot of keyboards and synths and currently I own 2 keyboards and 2 synths. I am also a guitarist and producer. When the Yamaha Tyros came out I was completely sold! It had the sounds I had been looking for, for at least 10 years. I had gone through Rolands, Kurzweils and Korgs, but when the Tyros arrived it just blew away the competition completely! Now after I've played it for a year I am still very fascinated about it! I wish every keyboard out there would be that charismatic! Then my life would be nothing but keyboards hehe!
Oh gosh, I just can't stop liking it!
I just want to comment a few things about the trends that currently are going on in the keyboard/music production world right now. One thing that is becoming more and more popular right now is computers and keyboards all in one package! There are a few such keyabords on the market, for instance the Neko and the Dreamstation X 76. It is an interesting concept I think is not developed well enough yet to be worth the money. I would like to see a laptop built-in with touchsensitive screen before I even start thinking about these keyboards.
The reason is 2 things:
- User interface
- Sounds
The Neko has built in Windows XP Professional. So far so good. In order to taking the music production to the next step the user needs big real-time working space, that means being able to control different kinds of production tools in real-time through the user interface in a fast, easy and flexible way. I will give you an example. You are performing live when you suddenly feel it's time for suprprising the audience with a solo with some real B3 vibes! What you normally do is to press an organ button and choose your custom edited organ sound and then you play the solo. But wouldn't it be good to just press a pre-stored custom organ setup button and get a custom edited organ environment ready with leslie, tonewheels and speaker setup in the user interface as well as the possibility to have it dynamically equalized based upon the accoustic environment? Well with the neko you will be able to do this through virtual instruments, but with such a small display you won't be able to reach all at the same time. This is the first big problem.
The second problem has to do with sound quality. We all know that good audio quality comes from a good and clean signal describing the tone realisticly and precisly. The virtual instruments have improved much lately, in the sense that the tone is getting more rich and realisticly sounding through virtual instruments that are able to be played at 192 kHz/24-bit. However, when looking at virtual instruments from a total perspective, the sound quality is lacking richness in accoustics, dynamics and realism due to the fact that most of them are sampled with 44 kHz sampling rate on a 16-bit resolution. This leaves much noise in the signal, especially if the sampling platform used for the virtual instrument was bad. I currently prefer something like a Yamaha Tyros in sound quality, however, when virtual instruments generally improve I will rate the Neko much higher, but that is then more for practical reasons, it is simply easier for live performances to have all in one.
Some here have commented that the next Yamaha Tyros will be expensive when compared with the Dreamstation or the Neko, when you get a multi GHz processor in the purchase as well. My opinion is that this depends on the environment it is put in. If you put the Neko in a professional studio it becomes expensive, because you don't need an extra built-in computer available through a small GUI. This is why I believe the Yamaha currently has the right concept with their keyboard arrangers.
Yamaha built the Tyros so it would be priceworth both in a professional studio and as a standalone peace of unit by clearly separating computer processing through USB. For instance they knew that the sequencer was not the most important thing in it because you would still choose to edit through a computer's interface. By doing this they were able to equip it with high quality sounds, effects and registration features instead, and I'm glad they made that choice. Currently Yamaha has the knowledge of building an arranger with mega voices, sampler, vocal harmony, tonewheel drawbars and advanced mixing features like surround sound, they would simply combine for instance the Motif, the Tyros and the DME32 but Yamaha prefer to separate them in order to make each filling its purpose to the maximum. So when the next Yamaha Tyros arrives, I hope it is not equipped with a lot of extra stuff, I hope it has more as good sounds and styles as it has today and that it is expandable in the sound and style sections. Go for it Yamaha!
Best regards,
YamahaAndy
[This message has been edited by YamahaAndy (edited 02-20-2005).]
[This message has been edited by YamahaAndy (edited 02-20-2005).]
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