AlenK

Curiouser and curiouser. Myself, I would have interpreted the text "...and are assigned to the sliders (1/9 through 8/16)" on page E-29 of the XW-P1 manual to mean that the DEPTH of each of the eight virtual controllers is assigned to one of the first eight sliders in order, and furthermore ONLY as a convenience during editing of the virtual controllers. (DEPTH because that is the only continuously-variable parameter that can be specified for virtual controllers, excluding the control sources themselves.) I would NOT have interpreted the text as allowing a control source (such as CC#10 in Ted's example) to be assigned to a slider and hence the slider acting as if it is that control source, which Ted's experiment seems to indicate is the case. I WOULD have expected a CC#10 message (following Ted's example) input on the solo-synth's input MIDI channel to control the chosen destination parameter (attack time in this case) in Tone or Performance mode, which Ted's experiment seems to indicate is NOT happening. The plot, as they used to say, thickens. UPDATE: Now that I have access to my P1 I messed around with the virtual controllers again. I had never bothered operating the sliders when I did that previously. Surprise, surprise, all they do FOR ME is to switch between the virtual controllers. That is, when you move one it switches the editing screen to the corresponding virtual controller. Just that and nothing else. Somewhat useless since you can switch between them using the PART+ and PART- buttons and there are only eight (so not like you need quick random access). I could not replicate what Ted describes, assigning a slider to act like it is adjusting the parameter for whatever CC# is selected as the source.

Actually, what I wrote may have misled you a tad. If you know you won't be playing higher than C5 (e.g., you are making a bass tone) then you can probably use the -B waveform, or the -L waveform if you are sensitive to aliasing. They will sound richer than the normal waveform. If you need to play higher, then use the normal waveform.

Some of the details for what they used are found here: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar11/articles/classic-tracks-0311.htm These should help too (I don't know how the guy gets these): But I can't find the bass guitar stem nor one for the vocals.

Roland stuff has always been relatively pricey. But if you are into EDM the entire Aira (pronounced eye-ra, ear-a or air-a depending on which web site and video you watch!) suite of products may seem like a dream come true (assuming said EDM enthusiast is not a total analog snob). Personally, these products are not my cup of tea but any and all competition is healthy. No manufacturer gets to rest on their laurels for long!

Reminds me of Peter Gabriel stuff around the time of Shock The Monkey.

Very nice. The singing is quite good. May I ask where the vocals come from? You say they are sampled but that could mean anything, really. Did you get them from another audio source? Hire singers? Sing one of the parts yourself (male or female, I don't want to assume anything)? PS. Never mind! I see the answer in another one of your earlier posts.

What post would that be? I can't seem to find it.

I believe the iConnectMIDI will do this, as well as a lot of other things. http://www.iconnectivity.com/iConnectMIDI

Some keyboards have a high trigger point to go along with their drawbar-organ emulations in order to be more responsive and more like a real B3 in that regard. Roland's VR-09 is an example. This doesn't take any extra hardware; the engine just plays the organ sound upon receipt of the first trigger as a key is depressed without waiting for the second trigger near the bottom that it would normally have to wait for to calculate key velocity. (Organs aren't velocity sensitive so there is no need to measure velocity.) Does the XW-P1 use a high trigger when it is playing a drawbar-organ tone? (I should really have posted this in the XW-P1-specific forum. Mea culpa.)

Somehow I don't think we're going to get a definitive answer from Casio on this. Mike Martin from Casio has avoided specifying before, probably because with all the different methods of compressing data it really doesn't tell you much. Some boards just do better than others with a given amount of memory. That said, dis-assembly of the the XW-P1 reveals that it uses two 128Mbit Flash chips, for a total of 32MB (Megabytes). Flash memory is non-volatile, so this is where stuff goes that needs to be stored when the machine is not powered, which includes the PCM data. Some of the Flash memory is used to store non-PCM data including all the settings for sound parameters, performances, sequences, phrases, arpeggios as well as global settings. But all told that probably doesn't consume more than a megabyte or two. So I would estimate about 30MB for PCM. (The XW-G1 may have additional memory for user samples; I don't know since I haven't seen the main board for one of those.) http://www.casiomusicforums.com/index.php?/topic/4834-pooched-xw-p1/page-2#entry9540 Now, ~30MB isn't a whole lot nowadays. In fact, it's downright miserly no matter how good your data compression scheme might be. But the XW makes the most of it. Take for example the stereo piano. While its waves take the largest chunk of the PCM memory I'm sure that even in the P1, which uses a better (triple-strike) piano than the G1, it is still I am sure less than half of it, perhaps considerably less. Yet it still sounds pretty good. PS. If I got anything wildly wrong I'm sure Mike will correct me. I have been wrong before. Once.

Power up the keyboard, press the TONE button and select, say, the stereo grand piano voice. If the lowest five keys still don't work then you might really have a problem. Yes, keys can be disabled for certain sounds within Performances, which might be what your daughter experienced (but there's not enough info to know for sure). By default the XW powers up in PERFORM(ance) mode. When you select TONE mode, the sound you select plays across the entire keyboard. It's the mode you want to be in when auditioning sounds or you just want to play a piano or organ piece, for example. PS. This advice assumes that the KEYSHIFT button is turned off, as per Brad's reply above.

Clever. Thanks for sharing!

Video from the Casio booth:

Missed that. Is there a version in English?

No press releases yet from Casio concerning what they are showing at Musikmesse as far as I am aware. This is all I have seen so far about new Casio products at the show (and how new they actually are I don't know): http://www.delamar.d...cdp-230r-23410/ http://www.musikmach...nos-vor-3771062

Yes, sad. I was just on the live feed a few moments ago but had to quit when my connection started to break up so bad I couldn't make out what Mike was saying. When I reconnected someone else was there instead of Mike. Oops, bad timing on my part. I'll try again later. Frankly, it's got to be Mike on the other end or I don't participate. Sorry, other guy!

Part of my desire for such a screen is because it will make a good first impression to potential customers. Some people can't get past seeing the Casio name on a keyboard. The only thing that will take that stigma away is for more people to buy Casio keyboards, which is a chicken-and-egg problem. One way to get more people to even consider buying one (those that aren't immediately turned off by the name) is to make them more appealing both visually and technologically. Giving them a color touchscreen and one at least as big in size (although not necessarily in resolution) as what they can get on some smartphones is a relatively easy way to do that. It brings them up to date in the eyes of today's consumers. It also, of course, brings some new options and benefits to the UI, one of which is to potentially reduce the number of hard buttons (they cost money too). Do we absolutely need such a screen? No. Is it a good idea? IMO absolutely.

Ok, ok...SK-5. But it was not my first keyboard, just my first Casio. And I didn't buy it. I actually found it by chance among my wife's stuff from her apartment when we got married and bought a house. She had bought it for her young son back when it was new. He apparently didn't take to things musical (more into sports and all). It stayed in its box in storage until I discovered it a few years ago. Popped in some batteries and it's like its new. Needless to say its mine now.

I would love to see Casio use the same display found on the newly introduced Korg Pa300 arranger. According to Korg's specs it is a 5-inch diagonal color touchscreen with 480 x 272 resolution. More than good enough IMO. Sourced in China (of course!) it is not an expensive display: probably no more than $15 and could be close to $10 in the kind of moderately large quantities Casio would be buying it in (assuming they were to design it in across the top of their synth, arranger and stage piano lines). http://www.korg.com/uk/products/synthesizers/pa300/index.php Discuss.

I remember this song. It's a good song but maybe not good enough to listen to multiple times to try to unravel this mystery. But wait, what's that I see at 0:51 in the second (live) video? A keyboard player. And what is he doing? He's banging on the keys in exact time with the pulsing the OP is talking about. Mystery solved. At least when playing live in this instance no arpeggiattor is being used. How they did it in the studio is anyone's guess. I note that the sound of this pulsing is different on the studio recording heard in the official video. The version played live by the keyboard player is missing the gradual loss of volume and high frequencies as the notes repeat. For the studio recording a guitar though a delay line would be my first guess but as Mike says there's no reason you couldn't replicate this on either an XW or PX-5S and in several different ways. Obviously in a live situation they're not going to get another guitarist just to play that track so they relegate it to the keyboard player who otherwise isn't doing dick in that song. Notice in the first live video they didn't even bother with this sound. Perhaps the keyboard player was off getting a drink. ("Hey, we're on. Where the f*** is Jerry??" "Dunno. Last I saw him he was trying to pick up a girl at the bar." "Screw him, let's play.") PS. This band doesn't/didn't seem to like keyboard players very much, judging by how far back on stage they pushed the one shown in the second live video and how little time he gets on camera (he is barely there).

It definitely takes work to understand the manual. But once you figure out the relatively poor English and get used to the way Casio re-uses the same words to mean different things depending on the context (part and channel are sometimes used interchangeably, part is used where they meant track, etc.) its actually pretty useable. Nevertheless, it is with no false modesty that I say I could write a better one in my sleep. (Yes, I write professionally in my spare time.) But at this late date there would be no point. Now, a tutorial to go along with the manual would still be useful IMO. But who's going to pay to have one written? That would be necessary IMHO because it's already been established that the self-publishing route is not likely to yield many sheckles. Something that size and as detailed as it would have to be doesn't get banged out in a few days or even weeks. It takes real effort over many months. And it really can't be done in a complete way without Casio's direct involvement; there are too many technical aspects of the XW synths that should be in such a docment but are not revealed in any of the existing documents available to users.

Mike, you have just now and several times in the past equated the XW's use of the word "channel" with a MIDI channel. But I have verified by experiment that the "channels" you can select as destinations for the control tracks (1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 or 16 but not 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7) are not MIDI channels. They are actually what I will call "mixer parts". This is where the manual and the XW's menu text fails us. Part, track and channel are often used interchangeably in the manual and in certain places in the menus. In the context of the step sequencer channel does not refer to MIDI channel. The proof is that you can change the output MIDI channels and/or the input MIDI channels to whatever you want on any of the "mixer parts" the step sequencer is playing without affecting the way it plays back the internal sounds. I just this moment tried it to double check (my test sequence used two control tracks, each changing a clearly audible parameter on separate audio tracks). If the destination "channel" of a control track was actually a MIDI channel this could not be true. There is a direct mapping or "hard wiring" (although it's probably all code) of the sequencer tracks to the mixer parts except for Solo1, which can choose to play either mixer part 1 (=Zone 1) or mixer part 14. That mapping is shown in the diagram on page E-50 where Casio unfortunately implicitly refers to the mixer parts as channels (by using "8ch", "9ch", etc) The diagram also doesn't illustrate the part 1 or 14 choice for the Solo1 sequencer track. The MIDI channels assigned to those parts for the current performance are completely independent of this mapping. You are free to change both the input MIDI channels and the output MIDI channels to whatever you want. None of that has the slightest affect on the way the step sequencer plays the internal sounds or controls them via the control tracks. Try it yourself. Or contact the engineers in Japan for confirmation.

XW-Addict, I'm afraid I really don't understand what you are saying. Some of it seems to contradict what I know from experience can be done with the sequencer but because of the language barrier (I'm guessing from previous posts that English is not your first language) I can't be sure. Perhaps Mike's upcoming tutorial video will address some of this or otherwise help you do whatever you're trying to do. Can anyone else help XW-Addict?

Dear administrator, I think this thread, which is in much the same vain as the previous ones bodisattva recently started in which he likes to sound greatly put upon, proves that he has a single agenda here. I hereby withdraw the offer of support I made to this individual, who doesn't even have the courtesy of replying to others in the same thread (which is why I'm addressing you instead of him - what would be the point?). After he voluntarily leaves in frustration that no one can make sense of his posts (I guess we're just not smart enough) perhaps you will consider doing a minor cleanup. It worked wonders last time. PS. In the spirit of bodisattva's multiple threads in which he effectively replies passively to something said in another I will comment here that there is another possible reason for people not replying to his October question, besides the convoluted way he asked it (perhaps he expected everyone here to be MENSA members). The reason could well be that no one knew then (and likely do not know now) the cause of that particular problem. In that case the answer to his direct question would have been "No." Since that isn't very illuminating or helpful people chose not to reply at all. The same thing has happened to me here. Did I get all pissy about it? Of course, the above explanation is too simple so it can't be correct. It MUST be because of Casio's incompetent technical support. I don't care what anyone says to the contrary. Now please excuse me while I admire the size of my brain in the mirror.

Well, that's gratifying. Sorry if I came off as confrontational. It's just that too many people nowadays expect almost EVERYTHING file-based to be free. The business models that would allow someone to get rewarded for putting in the effort to create something are very limited in that kind of world. Suppose, just for argument's sake, that I WAS in the process of creating just such a guide for the XW-P1. At least now I know if I were to offer this purely hypothetical tome as a download I would make some small multiple of $20. Small multiple because in short order someone would upload it to a file sharing site and that would be all she wrote (or he in this case ). PS. Heck, I might even make $0.02 an hour on such an effort. Hot dog!