Kawai K3 and K3m

  • Technical Specifications of K3 and K3m (including graphs of waveforms!)
  • Patches for K3 and K3m
  • Picture of K3m
  • Additional K3m documentation for people that have the K3 (keyboard) manual but want K3m (rack) information.
    • The Kawai K3/K3m is a subtractive synthesizer utilizing digital oscillators and analog filters and amps, with six voice polyphony (non-multitimberal). It has a healthy midi implementation including volume, aftertouch and sysex editing of parameters. Stereo. The K3m is the 2U rack-mount module version of the K3 keyboard. There are 32 predefined waveforms, plus one user defined waveform using 63 additive partials.

    Patches

     To download these patches, select Load to Local Disk from your browser, and click on the desired anchors. All files are pure MIDI sysex messages, no more, no less. You can either download Individual Patch Dump Files, each containing 50 sounds, or archives containing all files: k3lib.zip, k3lib.lzh

    WARNING: Make sure you backup the current settings on your K3 or K3m before trying any of these patches. There is no guarentee that these sysex files may crash your machine, and you may have to reset the machine to the factory defaults.

    Please Send in YOUR SOUNDS!

    If you have a K3 or K3m, use you favorite MIDI program on your computer and dump all the patches from your machine (Select EXCL 2=3 to have the K3 send full patch info when you press a patch button). Save the patch information as pure MIDI SYSEX information. You can check to see if it is MIDI sysex: the first byte should be 0xF0 and the last 0xF7. Use zip or tar to archive the files, then send the file as a MIME attachment, or use uuencode on the archive, and mail the result to Mark Lakata, the maintainer of this page.

    Commercial Patches available

    Contact: Russell A. Cardwell, West Broadway Productions

    Some Hints from Users

  • You can use some midi controllers to vary parameters of the K3m easily. The MM-16 has 16 faders which can be programmed to send any controller or sysex message (about $200 ?). The PC1600 is similar but more advanced, and it has knobs too, I think, but it's definitely more expensive.
  • MIDI Control 1.0 at Harmony Central is a program for 680x0 Macintoshes for also manipulating real time midi messages. (It's an old program that might be deleted because of age...)
  • There is no way of sending all the patches at once from the front key panel, but you can do it with a MIDI message. Connect something like "MIDI control" to the midi-in on the k3, and connect something like a Yamaha V50 sequencer to the midi-out, and send the patch-dump-request with MIDI control.
    • Mark Lakata (lakata@physics.berkeley.edu)