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First Impressions, velocity limitations


Old Man Tom

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        While waiting impatiently to afford a Kawai MP11 for my home studio, I was able to afford the PX560 (with a remarkably similar feel) just from selling my venerable Roland MKS70 with PG800 programmer.  I was also leaning toward the Kurzweil Artis until I played the keyboard.

 

         The 560 is weird and wonderful, and the brains are perfectly suited  finicky old timers, with certain reservations- aside from the purchase itself.  We should be able to record the input jacks along with the keyboard.  Then there's this velocity thing which, in fairness, rolls over to the subject of post-production.   
      
         To explain, I assume the (outstanding) demos on board reside in a .wav or mp3 format and are not produced from permanent registrations using midi.  This changes an old rule of thumb about what you hear in demos being what you get on board.  These demo tracks, emphasis on piano, far exceed the fidelity this keyboard can normally produce for itself, even assuming the keyboard and demos share original samples.  I’ve tweaked extensively to get better expression and a hotter signal, which the demos certainly encourage.   But even the light velocity setting on the 560 seems to require more force than expected to reach full resonance, compared, for example, to my Midiboard playing the same tones.  Turn off velocity and the full samples jump out very well, but playing expression is lost.   Any registrations/ advice on point would be welcome.  I’ll post my own when more satisfied.   

         

        The PX560 is like a Swiss army knife where keyboards are concerned, but the manual needs a section outlining demo sound processing to explain what’s missing out of the box.   It could also use more clarification about the interrelationship (?) of upper and lower tones.  I still don't get it except the layering of upper tones.   

 

Cheers, “Old Man Tom"  
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1 hour ago, Old Man Tom said:

To explain, I assume the (outstanding) demos on board reside in a .wav or mp3 format and are not produced from permanent registrations using midi.

 

I very much doubt that. AFAIK the PX-560 doesn't process MP3. And the memory required for WAV would be much more gainfully employed on samples, etc. I'm quite positive the demos are playing the internal sounds live using the equivalent of MIDI files (Casio uses its own format internally). Maybe Mike Martin can confirm.

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Sounds like something is defective in your PX-560.  I would test another one for comparison.  The demos are exactly what is possible from the keys. The keys are triple sensor and the sound engine responds with over 16,000 levels of velocity.  And yes, the internal demo tunes are essentially standard midi files playing the same tones available to the user. 

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Alen & Brad,   Serious thanks for the encouragement.  All things considered, I think the best solution is a return/ exchange of the keyboard.  Even with lingering uncertainty, it’s the only way I don’t stand to lose, plus the dealer is reliable.    Thanks for getting me there sooner rather than later.   

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Old Man Tom,

 

As far as the volume is concerned, you can increase it by doing the following steps:

- Go to Tone -> Edit -> Amp and increase the volume of the tone (it works on the tone basis)

- Go to Master Equalizer and increase the input level. It works globally.

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