Grand Hybrid DEFAULT SETTINGS

[Eli26]

Loving my new Casio Gp400. Mostly playing it, but also playing with the parameter settings to find the ones I like best. I had two questions for Casio owners: (1) In playing around I'd like to get a better idea as to what the presets are actually doing. So there is a control that lets you adjust the brilliance from + 3 to -3. Additionally, for each of the main grand piano sounds, there are presets called Mellow and Bright (for example Berlin Mellow Piano, Berlin Bright Piano). My question is are those mellow and bright tones simply the standard tone with the brilliance parameter changed? Or is there something different about the tonality and sound signatures of all the bright and mellow variations which cannot be reproduced using the standard settings? ( my point of course is that if the Vienna mellow for example is the same as Vienna with just a little tweak off brilliance then I don't really need to pay attention to it when I'm trying to figure out how I like my Vienna to sound because all I need to do is make the tweak myself as part of the settings). (2) One last question for now which would be useful to know but I'm not sure Casio actually says anything about this in the literature. There are a huge number of parameters which can be changed, and for each one, there is a setting (D/default) which casio calls "the optimum setting for the selected instrument, or selected scene". So you can select "off", "Default" or a number from 1 to 10 It would be nice to know what the relationship is between the default setting and the numbers 1 to 10. I can think of two very distinct possibilities. One is that for each instrument whatever the default is, it's essentially the equivalent of a setting of 5.5, in other words, the numbers 1 to 5 are settings lower than the default,m and the settings 6 and up are settings higher than the default. Alternatively and more likely, the default setting is actually a setting which corresponds to one of those numbers between 1 and 10. However for reasons I can't imagine it seems like there is no way to know what that default setting actually is!! When adjusting from the default, pushing the button to raise the setting ALWAYS starts it on "1", This of course adds a huge layer of mystery into what the adjustments are doing --- what if I say "I like that tone or scene, but I'd like what it would be like with with just a little bit more damper resonance. Well, if I don;t know what the original setting is, I'm guessing as to whether I'm adding more or keeping it the same. Unless I'm missing something..... Is there somewhere where they actually say what the default settings are for the various pianos and scenes??

[Brad Saucier]

1 hour ago, Eli26 said:

My question is are those mellow and bright tones simply the standard tone with the brilliance parameter changed?

 

No, not necessarily.  Any number of other parameters could be different.  My suggestion is to start with the preset you like best, then tweak from there.

 

1 hour ago, Eli26 said:

It would be nice to know what the relationship is between the default setting and the numbers 1 to 10.

 

1 to 10 is the full range of adjustment for that parameter.  I'm pretty sure the default setting can be anywhere in that range.  I'll have a look around, but I don't think the defaults are listed anywhere.

[Eli26]

Thanks for your reply.  I had posted this on pianoworld forums and didn't get anywhere, so some of what follows is cut and pasted form there.  Sorry if its disjointed. I just wantedto explain WHY I want to know what those defaults are (and also why I woulk like to know if the mellow/bright pianos are merely the regular pianos with some modifcations which can be done in the menus --- and if so, what are those modifications).

 

Basically, I really want to spend some time playing around with the sounds to find the ones that I like.  It would really help to know the exact parameters so I don't waste time or go in circles.  It frankly seems kind of silly that casio would go to the trouble of setting up certain pianos to have certain defaults, and allow us to change those values, yet not tell us what those defaults are! 

 

One usually has an idea in which direction you'd want to adjust something. Or sometimes you might like one sound better but you're not sure you could precisely describe why and knowing that could give you insight to help you adjust other sounds. (Like "I get it, that extra resonance I'm hearing with that piano is the aliquot resonance dialed way up.  Ok I'll see what happens with piano X when I play with the aliquot resonance.  Or I want it dialed down just a bit... whatever....
Or if a certain piano happens to sound a little bit too resonant for my taste, it would be useful to know which of the many resonance settings are High (and how high) so I could better know which one to adjust.

Clearly many people including myself can go through the process of finding good settings without this information but it just seems that this would be useful information......

 

All in all, it's not a HUGE deal. But It's kind of like if you feel that you wanted to make the volume of one input in a mix just a TINY bit louder than what it is, to see how that affects the overall sound, and you have to enter a number to do so (like on some kind of digital control that doesn't have a slider), but you have no way of knowing what the current volume is, and no one will tell you. Sure, if you know you want it at the max you just turn it up to 11 (unless you have a bad amp, in which case you turn it up to 10), but if you just want to see how it sounds with a small increment, you're kind of lost if you don't know where it started....

 

On taht same topic, if in fact the brilliant piano just means that the regular piano has the lid rmeoved and brightness up at 3 (or whatever it is) than that's useful information. But if it differs from the other pianos in a way which CAN'T be duplicated by the user manipulating the settings, than that is also useful.  In that case I'd want to experiment with that piano as a separate entity, knowing that it can't be duplicated by starting with the standard piano. 

 

This of course can be extended to the other pianos --- the modern grand, the rock grand (which seems to have limited dynamic range, I think --- it seems like it can only be played loud -- is that right?)  If they are simply vienna/berlin/hamburg midified in the same way that a user can, it would be good to know HOW -- -as a kind of tutorial in how to achieve certain sounds.  Or if that whole family of pianos are modifications from one sample (different form the three main ones). that would be good to know.   Are there three core sounds?  Or are there more?

 

And in summary -- long story short is that knowing the defaults as well a steh answer to the questions about brilliant/mellow/rock/dance/pop/rock gives me much much more information and makes playing with the controls much more systematic and akin to adjusting settings on a VST (without buying and setting up a VST).  

Maybe someone at Casio could simply let us know what the default numbers are. I'm sure it's not a super-secret thing,,,,,

 

Thanks again for your help!!