bfields

You can tell which *bank* number (1-24) you're currently on by looking at the bottom right corner of many of the screens (like the main and tone screens), but, yes, there's no indication of any current registration number (1-4) . I have a paper list of all my registrations--kinda necessary since there's no way to name them. So I consult that to make sure I'm not accidentally overwriting the wrong thing. And worst case I try to remember to make backups to USB every now and then. I don't know any other solutions, sorry.

There is this, now: http://support.casio.com/storage/en/manual/pdf/EN/008/PX-560M-midi-imple_EN.pdf I don't have enough experience reading these things to know if there's anything very useful there....

The mixer, that does it, thank you so much! (In my defense, that doesn't strike me as *the* most obvious place for it! I'd tried the controller menu, and editing the individual tones, and a few other places, but not the mixer....)

Anyone know if it's possible to turn off pitch bend selectively, so for example it only affects the bottom half of a split?

The 560 doesn't have a clonewheel simulation like other keyboards do. I think it might be possible to get part of the way there by piecing together organ sounds in hex layers and setting an external MIDI controller to control the levels of the various layers? Never tried it, but I think if you google around you'll find people trying similar tricks with the px-5s (which has a similar synth engine but more physical controllers).

I sometimes do what AlenK describes with an expression pedal. For some reason I found it hard to predict which pedal position (heal up or heal down) was which--I'm not sure it's even been 100% consistent from one boot to the next of the keyboard. It works otherwise.

The instructions could use a little work, too. "After the update, you need to run the "Initialize All"." What does that even mean?

OK, I finally did get it downloaded, but it took a few tries and 15-20 minutes. Something needs fixing.

I'm getting abysmal download speeds (like 10's of KB/s) and timeouts trying to download the zip file with the update. Anyone know what's up? My internet connection is otherwise fine.

That's weird, I'm not seeing that. What pedal are you using, and have you recalibrated it recently? For what it's worth, I upgraded to 1.14 tonight, recalibrated the expression pedal, then spent 5-10 minutes fooling around with it, listening (controlling filter cutoff on a synth patch), and watching the values (knob1 is set to control the same panel, so you can watch the numbers on the "main" screen). I don't really have any objective measurements, and this is the first time I've used the pedal in a couple weeks. But subjectively, it seems good now. The changes seemed smooth across the range, and I didn't notice any jumping. I'm using a Roland EV-5, which is one of the pedals that manual claims as supported.

Hah, yeah, I don't really get it either. I normally use either the 3-pedal unit or one of the Roland pedals with the swivel-out pad that goes under your foot to prevent slipping. The one advantage of the included pedal is that it *is* very portable. Every now and then I find myself trying to travel very light, but still wanting a sustain pedal. But usually the 560 is the keyboard that I take with me anywhere, and once I'm already carrying an 88-key keyboard (even one on the light side), there's not point worrying about a few ounces for the better pedal. So, that little pedal doesn't get a lot of use.

Just note that in that case the sustain pedal will just be an on/off switch, it won't support half-pedal, unlike the sustain pedal that's part of the 3-pedal unit.

(Oh, I should have said: the 560 boots in about 12 seconds.)

I ruled out the Krome based on the approximately one-minute boot time. Lots of people seem to love it anyway (and love the Kronos, which takes even longer to start up), so it shouldn't necessarily be a deal breaker for you, but it was for me.

For what it's worth, my experience with expression pedals: I already had a Yamaha FC7, and I could plug it in and calibrate it and it would sort-of work but no matter how I fiddled with parameters I could never get it to smoothly sweep across the range I wanted to. So I bought a Roland EV-5, because it was one of the ones listed as tested on p. EN-10 of the manual. It's been fine for my purposes. But my ear or my requirements may be different from yours. I was testing with filter cutoff on an analog synth sound, and expression on an organ sound. In both cases I'd be unlikely to notice imperfect behavior near zero. For example in the organ case I care about making the organ more or less prominent compared to the rest of the band, I'm probably never going to need it to fade in or out smoothly from silence. OK, I tried it just now: I set the EV-5 to control volume of a string sound, turned master volume all the way up and used the internal speakers, and: yeah, it's unpredictable and jumpy at the bottom of the range. Bah.