Bill H.

Hi AlenK. My own approach to this keyboard is very application specific. I'm using it primarily in a praise and worship band, and like to layer different sounds fluidly throughout the service. It's probably not what most users would do. But anyway, I basically layer both hexes (one on top of the other) in a stage setup, and then control their respective layers with the sliders as a single unit. I had to come up with a way to control the balance between layer 1 of hex 1 and layer 1 of hex 2 (to use an example) which is why I came up with the pulse wave solution. There are other ways of doing this btw but this lets me do it with a single value. Setting up the sliders to control the layers in a single hex is extremely easy to do, and since that's the approach most players take I wouldn't worry too much about how I'm doing it. But since I haven't seen anything quite like what I'm doing in the current PX-5s videos, I'm thinking about making one as soon as my life gives me the time to do so.

Sure - here's some details. I don't put Tones in Zones 1 or 2 becaue I reserve them for Hexes. When I put the first piano of the Casio (GrPnoConcert) in Zone 3 and use it's DSP for EQ, the settings don't consistantly update when I switch to that Stage setup. It's weird because I can go into edit and see the numbers that I used, but they're just not working until I change one. Then it snaps into place. The LFO bug is a little different and probably not applicable to the vast majority of PX-5s useres. As I'm sure you know there's no source-destination modulation matrix per se on this keyboard (which is perfecly fine on an instrument of this type since it's basically a piano) but in Hex you can do quite a bit with the LFOs because it's a very flexible section of the synth engine and you can set their speed to zero. So (for example) I can mix the levels of the second layers of Hex 1 and 2 separately by modulating the amplifier of one of them to a pulse wave set to zero. You can't differentiate two layers with the sliders if they are the same number but in different hexes, which is why this is a nice thing to be able to do. This works great by the way! I do it all the time. So I tried the same approach in a Tone but this time my purpose was to keymap a sample set to a different location. This is a type of thing many of us do who are into rompler sound design. So I found out that even though LFO edits (and all edits for that matter) are offsets in Tones, while editing I could still bring a pulse wave to a dead stop! Fantastic I thought.. I pulled the adjacent sample set over the afflicted area that I wanted to change, retuned it, and it sounded perfect! That was until I saved it anyway. After saving, the pulse wave always had some movement to it (which wrecks everything) and I tried several times. I'll try to post a file it it would help but I'm just not able to do that right now.

Here's what I've found so far: When switching Stage setups, DSP EQ settings are sometimes not updated in the new setup if the sound source is a Tone. It seems to be random (I can't find a pattern) but it's frequent. If the sound source is a hex layer it seems to work fine. And sometimes it works the way it should with Tones too. It just glitches once in awhile. Once again the next bug only happens if the sound source is a Tone. Hexes seem to be ok. You can slow an LFO way down while editing, but the edit won't get saved. The first one is by far the most frustrating and I hope Casio releases a firmware update that addresses it sometime this summer.

I think it's worth mentioning that the update.bin file must be pulled from the folder that Casio downloads it in before the PX-5s will read it. I downloaded the updater from the website directly to a USB drive, and the keyboard didn't recognize it until I did this.