Hello again to all my Technics friends here on the Forum. What great fun I have been having with my KN-6500 and especially with all the fine suggestions, file-exchanges, etc. I have been finding here. Thanks so much to all of you for all the musical pleasure you have provided me of late.

Now, time for another question to all the experts here: is there any way to record from the 6500 directly to a tape recorder so that the tape can be played back independent of the keyboard? (I know how to record to a floppy disk but cannot use a floppy except in my computer and want now to hear my playing through the tape recorder/player in my stereo system.) Thanks for any help you can provide either here on the Forum or sent to me via e-mail.

Ted Rose

Hi Ted.
This is usually no problem to do, you need to
connect your KN via Line Out with either two
single cables or a stereo cable to the Line
In (Sometimes called Rec) on your Tape Recorder.
Your KN uses 6.3mm jack plug (he), and your
recorder probably need adapted to Phono (he).
This is standard cables/adapters who you'll
find in the music or radio stores around.
There might be other connections to use on
your recorder too, depending of what brand
etc. Hope this for any help.
GJ

Dear Ted and Gang,
Here is a reprint of an article I did for TECHPLUS some years ago that expands a bit on GJ's info. Since I was never paid for the article, I'm free to share it.

RECORDING CDs FROM YOUR TECHNICS INSTRUMENT
By Frank Bez
With the introduction of several less costly CD recorders this past year, the possibility of recording CDs at home for friends and family has finally arrived. While the ideas we’ll talk about here are addressed toward producing CDs, they could just as easily be applied to recording cassettes or reel to reel tapes. The first step is to sequence some songs that will make an interesting listening experience. Most commercial albums have a theme. And, that’s probably not a bad idea. It’s not necessary to save your songs to disk in any particular order. They can be put in order later. I generally sequence songs as I find them and stop when I have 15 or 16 completed. Enough to fill the 74 minute recording time available on the CD.
EQUIPMENT
THE CD RECORDER that I use is the Phillips CDR 765. It is a dual deck, which allows you to easily make copies. HHB and Pioneer also has several similar models available. I like the Phillips because of the quality of it’s sound and excellent meters. Other manufacturers also have recorders, however they are quite a bit more expensive.

THE CD-R MEDIA that is required by these recorders has a copyright fee attached to the price of the empty CD. As a result the blank CDs that are used for computer data can’t be used in these audio recorders. There is no way to get around this because most people will use this recorder to copy commercial CDs, thus the copyright fee.

THE STEREO MIXER is an essential component in order to create an effective stereo sound stage on your recording. And, especially when recording from the Technic organs, the mixer offers a boost in the very weak signal from the organ to deliver a suitable level to the recorder. I use the JBL EON Music Mix 10 mixer. I’ve also used the Roland 6 Channel BX 60. A small but very clean little mixer.

GETTING READY
Run your audio cable from the right and left Line Out of your Technics to two of the Input channels of the mixer. In the organs the outputs are located under the keyboard. Keep the right and left channel identified and Pan the right channel all the way to the right and the left channel all the way to the left. Then go from the Stereo Out of the mixer into the Analog Input of the CD recorder, making sure the right and left channels are properly located. Now you will have to experiment a bit to adjust the gain and volume levels. You want as much gain as you can get without distortion, for if you use too much volume to get a strong signal, you will get noise. Both channels should be set to the same level. Now
it’s time to arrange your play list and time the songs. You only have 74 minutes on the CD. If you run over, you loose a song. Don’t forget the pauses between songs. I think about 3 seconds is good. There is a good deal to remember when you are recording, so I suggest that you write your play list down and make notes of any adjustments by each song. You will get the best recording by putting as strong a signal on the CD or tape without pegging the meter past the 0 dB point. That is not to say the meter can’t momentarily go past 0 dB, it just shouldn't lock up past it. I like to put a piece of white tape along side the volume control on the instrument and mark slight level changes with a pencil. You may prefer to do these adjustments on the master control of the mixer.
The main thing to remember is to move the volume pedal on your organ just once to set the initial volume and then don’t touch it . Then as you load the various disks to go through your play list, the volume will be constant. It’s a good idea to go through all the songs and note any slight adjustments you might want to make. The CD recorder works just like a tape recorder.
Load the first song in your instrument, press record, press start on the instrument; when the song is over press pause on the recorder and load the next song and start all over again. On a CD recorder, after all the songs are recorded and the recorder is stopped, it is necessary to finalize the disk. Finalization shows the location of the songs and makes the CD playable on any CD player.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING
Our Technics instruments are stereophonic devises. And while a good part of the thrill of playing a Technics is the spatial quality of the sound, this same experience is not as apparent to a listener who is some distance from the instrument. Ah, but with a little planning, a recording of the organ or keyboard can be made to sound even better than the original. The magic word is PAN.
If you press the SOUND button and then the PARTS SETTING button and then PAN, you will see a diagram of the stereo stage on which you can position any sound you choose. Now you can set the stage for your big band. Put the saxes on the left, put the horns on the right and the rhythm section in the center. When you play your recording back through your stereo system, it will sound as good as a commercial recording; if you play well, maybe even better.
The instruments have default pan settings. In the organs Orchestral Sound 1 pans the selected sound slightly to the right. Sound 2 is put in the center, and Sound 3 is slightly on the left. In the keyboards Right 1 is placed in the center and Right 2 is all the way over to the right. I’m not sure of the logic involved in these placements, but you can locate the sound wherever you want it. Thankfully, the rhythm arrangements on the Technics Music Disks are beautifully setup with regard to panning. However, I think a great deal more could be done with the right hand sounds. I know your imagination is going already.

Great job GJ and Frank. This will really be of great help to many of our forum members. It is great to see you pro's sharing with everyone. This is what will make this forum GREAT. Thank you so much. Your talents and willingness to share speaks for you.
BEBOP

Hi Frank,
it is a myth that you need the expensive audio CDs. Depending on the model of recorder it was possible to load your single blank audio CD, set up your recording while paused. Then use the emergency eject procedure (will vary depending on model) to remove the expensive audio blank and replace it with a cheap data blank. I have made many audio CDs with data blanks and frankly you cannot tell the difference. This is the main disadvantage with stand alone audio CD recorders, if you are limited to the expensive media.

Also with the latest keyboards, recording only stereo, a mixer is really not needed, since everything you need can be achieved in the keyboard mixer and the output level is sufficient. An analogue mixer will only degrade the 6000 output quality.

Also no overload is allowed in digital recording, you should always record a few dB down from maximum to allow for occasional transients too fast for the meters to register. Digital overload is a particularly nasty cracking, quite different to the more gradual 3rd harmonic distortion from analogue tape.

A pc recording system has the advantage of not being limited to expensive media, but a pc is a terrible environment to try and record the highest quality audio. My solution is an external usb soundcard. Here the 24 bit converters are situated right by the keyboard line out terminals with minimal loss in the analogue domain. The usb stream is already in 44.1 kHz format and the wave file appears on the pc hard disk with no quality loss or interference whatsoever. Wave editing can now be done entirely in the digital domain so the pc system used is now immaterial to maintain the original quality.

In fact the best quality converters I have found are in Sony DAT recorders which have a phenominal sound quality. You can record in 48 kHz (which most commercial master tapes are recorded at) and use the S/PDIF converters in the external soundcard to get the wave files for audio CD creation on your laptop, again all in the digital domain with no quality loss.

Well. . . The Phillips 765 refuses to work with anything but a blank AUDIO CDRW or CDR. I use the same technique that Frank uses except that I don't use a mixer. I just crank up the keyboard volume and feed the audio out of the keyboard directly into the little Phillips recorder. I have been amazed at the quality you can get from that little cheap recorder. Once you have the CD made with the Phillips recorder, you can put it into the computer and make all the copies you want on normal CDR CD's. Actually, the price of audio CD's has dropped so much recently here that it doesn't make much difference anyway.

[This message has been edited by Bob Hendershot (edited 02-10-2002).]

I've had great success recording straight into a Korg D16 mulitrack recorder from the 6500---then mixing-down to a stand alone CD burner. Sometimes I process the stereo outputs through various gear. The results are always clean and sound good to my
ear(s). I moved-up from the 6000 and never looked back. It's never faultered nor let me down. Can't wait to see/hear the 7000 when it appears.

Bob, quote: "depending on the model..." I never said it would work with this particular machine, it is obvious that just putting in a data CD will not work, that is why I described the correct procedure.
This is a well known trick with the first 2 generations of some audio CD recorders. That is why it pays to buy carefully for maximum flexibility.

[This message has been edited by technicsplayer (edited 02-11-2002).]

My, My. . .

Yes, it's all pretty amazing
I seriously considered updating a standalone audio CD recorder but decided for the external soundcard in the same price range instead for the flexibility.
The CD recorder is a good option for high quality if you are just going to record stereo and not multitrack. But for editing, you need to transfer to the pc and rip the CD-RW each time as you describe, which increases the time needed compared to having the wave file there direct ready for editing.
And nowadays it is easy to sync to a midi track and multitrack wave files to the pc for external processing if that's what you want to do.

[This message has been edited by technicsplayer (edited 02-11-2002).]

Well. . . I've got a whole bunch of stuff around here that I thought I would edit with. I even bought a Roland VS880 8 track digital workstation (which was one of my not so intelligent ideas). (By the way, it's for sale to the lowest bidder. . .) I've got Pro Audio 9 and a bunch of other software that I hardly ever use. You go right ahead and use that stuff and do your editing. I do what little editing I need at the keyboard sequencer and go directly to CD format with the little Phillips recorder. I don't see any need for editing at the PC unless you are a vocalist and need to edit vocal parts. I want to hear my stuff just the way I played it at the keyboard.

Quote:
(By the way, it's for sale to the lowest bidder. . .)
End quote
-----------------

Well, I start at -(minus) 5 million, guess it
is not low enought??
Have to be a good deal if we can get the stuff
and a bag of money too!
Well, I'm on the way to the basement to be low
enough for the next bid.
GJ

You live too high on the planet to get low enough, GJ

[This message has been edited by Bob Hendershot (edited 02-11-2002).]

Yeah, I guess it did not help even if I
crawled on the basement floor
GJ

seriously Bob, why do you say the vs880 was a mistake? I seriously considered a hard disk recording system to ditch pc soundcards, but decided that with a GigaHz/40GB laptop already, the usb soundcard route was more cost effective since most if not all of the external effects processing can now be achieved in software. I'm interested because I nearly took that route myself.

Alec, I remember many times getting impatient with young engineers when they presented a design plan that was obviously overkill. I would say, “Keep the basic objective in mind” or “Don’t try to install a thumb tack with a sledgehammer.” “There is no need to impress people with what we know or with a lot of neat equipment. They want to see the results of what we do.” Well, I forgot some of those basic rules with the VS880. The objective, for me, was to get something that I had recorded into the keyboard sequencer onto a CD. The CD needed two tracks for stereo and the keyboard had two outputs, one for each stereo channel. The question is, “What can external equipment do that can’t be done with the keyboard itself?” After giving that some thought, there wasn’t any editing that I could think of that I couldn’t do with the sequencer. But, I didn’t ask myself that question until I already had the VS880. Frank Bez was smarter. He talked to some of the pro’s and found that they had difficulty mastering the VS880 command structure. And, he went with the simple approach that I finally used. Much of the stuff that you find in the studio of a pro is there not because it is needed, but because they just “want it” or it’s the latest fad.

The VS880 stores recordings in a proprietary Roland format and the data has to be converted to .wav format with special software. The display is almost impossible to read on the model that I have (I have the VExpanded version with a 2 gig hard drive.) Later versions improved the display but it is still too small. In order to get a recording to a CD with my PC I had to first transfer my sequence to the VS880 from the keyboard. Then I after any editing that had been done with the VS880, I copied the file from the VS880 hard disk to a zip disk on a scsi zip drive that attached to the VS880. Then I loaded the file from the zip disk into the PC. Then the file was converted from Roland format to .wav. Then the .wav file was converted to CD. All of this has to be done for each song. The files are so large that you can only get three or four songs on a 100 meg zip disk. It would be better to have a direct scsi or usb2 interconnect to move data from the digital recorder to the PC. We Tennessee folks are pretty good at making music and money but the instructions for using the VS880 almost need a rocket scientist. When you compare all of that to recording directly to a CD with the Phillips, you can quickly see which way is better.

I guess I should emphasize that none of this is true if you are trying to record a vocal on top of, or with, the keyboard sequence. You just about have to have some sort of a vocal effects processor and digital mixing to get good results for a CD with a vocal.

That's very interesting about the vs880 operating structure. In the end I did not see the point of duplicating hardware that was already there in my laptops. As you, I did not see myself doing much wave multitracking, and if I wanted to record vocals, a digitech is probably as good as I need. So the usb route was the most cost effective because you just record a 44.1 wavefile direct to the laptop ready for manipulation and burning, no analogue degradations to worry about. It is easy to put a vocal wave on top, if you want to, and put it together in Cool Edit or Sound Forge. And I already had the dat machines, so S/PDIF conversion was a bonus.

The only area that concerned me about the straight sound from the 6500 was that it was not always possible to emulate the 'punch' of a retail cd, since keeping the dynamics away from distortion sometimes kept the mean levels low. This was down to compression more than anything, so very subtle manipulation of the peak/mean ratios in parts of a song could improve things to sound quite good. But most of everything else can be achieved in the 6500 mixer, with only slight tweaking needed externally for my ears.

Maybe no-one does a simple stereo hard disk recorder where you just cable the result to pc digitally because of this route, and because you can buy audio cd burners, dat, or a variation thereon. Certainly your experiences with editing on the vs880 are similar to the prospect of putting wave editing etc on a keyboard. It will be difficult to get the ease of use and flexibilty of doing it in windows with a mouse!