foxcorner

Hi all, I'm a new PX-5S user, and I'd like to share some comments, most of which are positive. The old Roland A-90 we'd been using at church died, and so it was time to invest in a new stage piano. Budget was fairly tight, so Nords and the like were out of the running. I was expecting to propose the Roland RD-300NX, but when I tried one in a store, I really didn't like the piano sound! (I can elaborate if people are interested.) By this stage I had found out about the PX-5S, and while I couldn't find one to play locally, I did find a PX-350 which I knew to be similar, and I loved it. So, at $300 less than the Roland, the 5S was a no brainer. The church ordered one and it's now on the stage. What can I say - it's wonderful! The piano sound is soooo wonderful, and the feel's great. As well as playing during the songs, I often play quietly between songs, supporting the worship and prayer, and this piano makes it super easy and very rewarding to do. In fact, even though I've been playing at that church for maybe 10 years, last Sunday was the first time someone came up to me and told me I need to record an album of worship piano music! I think she must have been responding to the wonderful piano sound; and I was for sure finding the Casio perfect for this kind of playing. Well done, Casio! The only real concern I've got, though, is with the sound architecture. I'm a looooong time synth user, having owned Korgs, Yamahas and had Roland synths at church; so I'm OK with getting my head around an architecture and figuring it out. However, in our church we have three people who rotate on piano duties, and one of them especially is not technical. This means that the natural behavior of prodding the keys that are labeled with instrument sounds won't necessarily give intuitive results, since there's never a time that one is outside of a stage setting. I've somewhat alleviated the problem by setting up a four-zone setting (piano, strings, pad and e-piano, all mixed on the first four faders, and with just piano turned up on load), so that when you turn on the instrument, it's playing piano... assuming no one has selected a different sound in the meantime. So I've stuck a piece of paper on the 5S with some instructions. ...but the fact that I need to do that, because the intuition of a non-technical user won't work, is the only fly in the 5S ointment, in my view. Other than that, it's gorgeous, and I am looking forward to many years of playing it in church. And I'm going to have to bring it home some time to record that album. Dan

In short, the way it's done is to edit the controllers so that sliders S1 and S2 are set to Control 7, Volume. Then, edit your zones for instruments 1 and 2 so that slider 1 is enabled for zone 1, but slider 2 is disabled; and the other way around for zone 2 (S1 disabled, S2 enabled). A hint: Before saving the stage setting for this, set the faders how you want them to be when you load the setting. Then, even though the faders can be wherever, when you load the setting, you'll have the sound you want up and the sound you don't want silent, say. I set up a stage setting for worship at my church: * Slider 1: Grand piano * Slider 2: Strings * Slider 3: Warm pad * Slider 4: Electric piano and it's saved so that whenever you load the sound, piano is up and the others are silent, irrespective of where the sliders are, until you touch them. Note that this approach does steal polyphony, as the notes are all playing, even when their volume's zero. However, with 256 notes, I haven't had an issue. And there's a fix by putting something into the second slot for each slider's assignments, but I forget what it was.