I got my first two SD1plus keyboards today. The first thing I noticed was the plus next to the SD1 logo and the new blue and red color buttons along with the familiar black ones. Out of the box I noticed inside, a quick guide to the SD1plus and the original owners manual for the SD1.
There is a section at the beginning explaining that the new sounds, including two new grand pianos are in the hard drive and may be loaded after powering on directly to program number one called "Grand Piano" The piano in the voice mode called "Piano" is the same piano as the one in the program when powered on and only after loading the Grand Piano from the sound bank in the hard drive or telling the keyboard to do a auto load on power on will you hear the different grand piano. It is great. Bold, yet very mellow when played softly. All the other new features are also explained in this user guide. There are also many newly developed styles in the SD1plus. The operating sytem shipped is the 4.0B version. This is not a new keyboad, but rather a later version of the original SD1 with all of AJ's features he added. I believe this is a very stable system and should make all who decide on this keyboard very happy.
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California

Hello George:

Does anybody knows if this new sounds/styles are going to be available for the already SD1 owners?......if so, where can be downloaded this sounds?, thank you very much.

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mdorantes

Here is what is important to know about the difference between the SD1 and the SD1plus. In the SD1plus, Ketron added a chip to the main board which increases the flash memory for the proprietary Ketron sound files from 8 MB to about 12MB. This was done to accommodate the new samples used in Piano100 and Piano200 which have more memory for a more natural sound. Although you can load these sounds into a SD1, you will be missing some of the samples because the SD1 only allows 8MB of sounds to be loaded.
It's just like when Ketron came out with new styles for the XD series and musicians tried to load these into their SD1's, not all styles sounded as good because there were different loops and voices in the XD9. For this reason, Ketron has come out with a library of styles just for the SD1 and they utilize the SD1 loops and sounds. If you tried these in an XD9, they wouldn't sound as good.
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California

I wanted to let those interested in the Harmony mode on the new SD1plus that there are two modes which can be chosen by the user. Mode 1 is just like the original SD1 which when used with a piano or any plucked type voice when playing chords would give you an additional sound when you released the keys and Mode 2 which makes any sound you use sound clean when playing a chord while using the harmony feature. At first I was concerned that the harmony feature was messed up again until I realized that the machine was set for Mode 1 when unpacked out of the box. I quickly changes this and saved the power on set up to remember mode 2 as my choice.
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California