Hi Guys, this is my first post here, so I'n new to the forum, although I'm old as dirt.

I've been doing strictly paino/organ gigs for many years, but I've recently started playing with a project where I am going to need a ton of orchestral sounds. I need both good solo instruments as well as some good live orchestra and string ensemble sounds. I'd rather do it in a few more boards than with a stand-alone unit as I need too many changes within one song for my feeble mind and fading eyesite to have to deal with too many changes.

As it stands, I have a Kurzweil PC1x, a Roland VK8, a Roland XP60 and an old 01/W Korg. I have the Kurx setups programmed about as deep as I can practically go. I'm not real fond of the XP60 sounds. I really like some of the 01/W patches, but it's getting old and reliability will become an issue.

Any ideas?

Paul,

Take a look at the Yamaha Tyros family of keyboards. They are probably the most robust keyboards for Orchestral sounds in a self contained keyboard without the use of samples or other software based vst's.

Hope that helps
Al

Im trying to remember, but I cant think of what Philip Glass used for the Powwaqatsi soundtrack. Throughout that disk, its hard to tell where the real instruments are and the sampled ones come in, and that was in 1988.

I read that the live version of the soundtrack was performed using a stack of eight akai s-950's but he may have used an emulator III originally.

I have gotten great results with an E6400 with the 128 voice board and 128mb of ram. I found that if you come across a good sample bank, it can be loaded painlessly.

The key is the envelopes. Envelopes are key in realism.