PA5x connected to my Sx900 via midi

Hi ,
Finally got my 2 keyboards hooked up together. Unfortunately with the Paas speaker system on the Korg, it made it too difficult to stack the sx900 on top, like I did with the es920piano, so I’ve place it on the side ( upside down L configuration).
IWith the sx900’s brilliant registration system, the setup really works well. Great part is I can use the Korg for melody voices or the sx900, I could probably even layer both together.
The sound from the sx900 goes thru the Line in of the PA5x, so I can play it through Korg Paas speaker system or my new JBL monitors. ( or both )Amazing how good isx900 sounds thru either system.
It’s ended up being a great combination. Really enjoying the PA5x bugs and all. Haha.

If you get into any communication with Korg and Yamaha, I hope you will bring up the continuing lack of standardization of MIDI codes for most common arranger functions.

Nearly 40 after MIDI first came out, and 30 or so years since arrangers became available, it is still unconscionable that the manufacturers have not yet got together and decided on common codes for such standardized functions as Variation selection, fills and breaks/fills, Intros and Endings, Part mutes, Bass inversion and transpose.

What should, in the 21 century, be a simple task of hooking two arrangers together and have them operate as one has been made needlessly complicated by a complete lack of standardization and often, the inability for front panel controls to send any codes at all..!

It’s laziness and inertia on their part. There’s absolutely no technical reason why two arrangers should not work seamlessly as one. Please, if you get their attention, bring this up…

Too much to hope for Diki. I remember this being a pet peeve of yours for years. Would be brilliant to just be able to use the fill , variation buttons on one keyboard and changes it on the other, but probably not in our lifetime. Probably never.
Meanwhile for me, I just need to set up registrations in the sx900 , I used to also user the registration sequencer before I ended up stacking the sx900 and es920, probably the way I’ll go again.
The sx900 stacked on top of es920 was the easier set up, than the the Lshape with the Korg, but it was ridiculous , I still had my p121 piano as well. Wall to wall keyboards. ( basically 3 piano’s eek!) Glad I managed to sell both pianos, I can move again in my little bedroom music room haha.

Korg forum has a wish list, I’ll mention it. I think most owners are just wishing they’d fix the bugs. Haha . Though personally a bug in the songbook is about the only one that has affected me to date, I try and find a workaround where possible.

Rikki, did you catch your husband in the middle of a murder (blackmail) or did you just marry Santa Claus? He is obviously very tolerant of your keyboard purchases . BTW, althogh this is an ARRANGER forum, you seem to be the only one with the new PA5x. Is there a significant improvement (sound, styles, features) over the well-regarded PA4x (bugs aside)? Has this produced bargains in the used PA4x market? Curious minds want to know .

chas

Well, actually I received a modest inheritance when mum passed away , so hubby suggested I buy myself something.

I unfortunately sold my Pa4x 3 years ago, figured there’d be a new model coming out some time soon, was I ever WRONG, ( pre Covid).
PA5x sounds brilliant. Sort of has that real live feel about it.
I have 88 fully weighted keys , so I was able to sell the pianos.
Picked it up for a great price from my ex boss, only a few hundred dollars more than I’d been quoted on a 61 note version from the sales guy.
To be quite honest though, it’s an unfinished product. For weeks there wasn’t even a manual available for it, and there were rumours that it was missing functions that were available on the Pa4x.
So I waited for the manual before I ordered just to make sure it still did what I needed at this stage. It ticked those boxes. They’re planning on adding back the missing functions with upgrades supposed next April.
I think it’s been redesigned ( something owners had been asking for) . Either way ,the operating system is different to how I remember it.
Possibly had I still owned a PA4x, I may not have bought one just yet, but I wouldn’t have picked it up for the price I got from the ex boss either, the sales guy just happened to be on vacation. Talk about timing. Haha

Word over at the Korgforums site seems to indicate a considerable improvement in D/A converters and a big revamp of the effects section, and indeed, other than the seemingly endless issues with missing features and poor importing of legacy data, overall impressions of the raw sound seem very positive…

Sadly, it seems that the feature I think is the most groundbreaking, the ability to play two styles at the same time and either have both of them play fully, or mix and match different parts using mutes and faders seems rather buggy and incomplete. But hopefully it can get fully sorted and incorporated into the Songbook (which afaik isn’t possible yet).

To be honest, this feature solves one of the things that made hooking two arrangers together in the first place so attractive, the ability to quickly combine say the drums of one style with the bassline of another, etc.. Korg have the nuts and bolts of this (and enough CPU horsepower to pull it off), and I deeply hope that everyone else takes a look at this and copies (and improves!) it. You want nearly infinite style variety? Even two different styles offers the possibility of many different sounding combinations. Expand that to hundreds of individual styles, you can see that style fatigue may well be a thing of the past.

You are indeed a lucky lady, Rikki. Can’t wait until I can get my hands on a PA5x and see what all the fuss is about (both good and bad!)… 🎹

Hi Diki,
all I know is , it sounds great. Being pre Xmas I haven’t had a great deal of time to spend on it yet.
It’s being able to play 2 styles at the same time that grabbed my attention too. I know that prior to the update there were syncing issues, that supposedly has been fixed. As far as I’m aware songbook at this stage doesn’t support playing 2 styles at once. Has some other issues too. Gather they’ll have to address that , or why have the option of playing 2 styles at once.
For me , just being for home use, for the time being, I can just pick and choose the 2 styles I want to play together. Editing isn’t all that difficult, copying style tracks from within the same style or from other styles , or even pads, seems to be working ok, importing and exporting as .mid files again seems to be working ok. They were a couple of important functions for me. Time spent on trying this has been limited, so far so good.
The mind really does boggle at the possibilities, 16 tracks for a style.
Let you know how I go, probably won’t be till after Xmas when I get some spare time.

The Roland morph feature was brilliant on the old VA series and others after that. Glad to see Korg included this and wish it was in the 4X. That feature is a game breaker and a whole lot of fun!

Zuki, the list of incredible features that Roland pioneered and then dropped is a very, very long one! 😢🎹

Hi , I had a VA7 also, bad timing though, a friend sold me his, and a couple of weeks later I got a kn7000. Being a Technics devotee , I never quite got round to spending much time on the va7. In hindsight , it’s pity.

Think it’s really sad for the Roland users that they stopped making the high end arrangers.

Early years for me, I always had a Technics going back to kn800 ,and Roland e20? I think it was, late 80’s.

Roland users know this well, but every new line of arrangers was met by a combination of anticipation and dread. We knew there’d always be something utterly amazing in the new arranger, but we also knew that something utterly amazing from previous models would get dropped as well!

To be quite honest, it was always the raw sound of the arranger that kept me as a lifetime Roland user… their basic sound was very close to pro workstations, punchy enough for use in a live band and the drums could hold up to that.

But when it came to features, there was much from other lines (multipads, break/fills, more front panel control) that I would have loved to have, and the other companies’ consistency of not messing with previous models’ best features while they updated them was possibly the thing I wanted the most…

But that ‘sound’! I never could get away from it!