Hi All,

Am seeking keyboard to play piano and organ sounds, hopefully with drawbar sliders. Good bass sound for manual split style playing. Loose jazz and blues style rhythms.Built in speakers for easy practice set up.

Have enjoyed browsing this forum, many interesting topics.

Thanks,

Eddy

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I'm not a huge fan of arrangers for jazz because the very nature of the genre calls for improvisation and those loose rythyms as you describe them.

I think Band in a Box can be a good alternative though. It seems that the program is very oriented toward the jazz genre. I don't care for many of it's styles in a lot of other genres, but the jazz styles are very good and they are plentiful.

AJ

thanks for the reply AJ.
I guess the main thing I'm seeking is being able to tweak the organ drawbars live while keeping split with bass. Rhythmic variety within the chosen style is what I'm looking for. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm mainly interested in traditional keyboard trio type settings with the portability of an arranger.

I have always enjoyed playing manual bass parts, and it bugged me that I couln't twiddle with organ drawbars in real time, because of my left hand being so busy. There are a number of arrangers with digital drawbars that work in real time, but the only ones that have real sliders are the Korg PA1 series and the Roland G70.
The Korg is a hell of a unit, and the ROland is too new to speculate on. There are a handful of them(G70s) on the streets, but too many conflicting reviews to make any opinions on popular concensus.

Soft button drawbars can be found on kn6x-7x, Tyros, PSR2k-3k, 9kpro.... and I THINK the WK series by GEM too.

Since your left hand is busy with the bass parts, maybe a soft button approach is workable ... you can record different drawbar settings in registrations, and swith on the fly with no change to the rhythm parts. It's worth some looking into.

Uncle Dave's summary was on the mark - as an added option to think about, maybe an external organ module like the Roland VK-8m would be the answer. Getting a decent piano sound out of an arranger isn't too hard but finding one with actual or virtual organ sliders would limit you to very few models. An external organ module would free you up to select a wider range of arranger or other keyboard options, plus the VK-8m happens to sound pretty good IMHO.

Hey Uncle Dave,

Just wanted to let you know that GEM WK and Genesys series use sliders for the drawbars. Here's a cut&paste from the WK8 manual:



-mike

look at Wersi, german made machines.

their arrangers (abacus, Ikarus)include drawbars and the sounds (and price) are great...

Exactly the same machine Korg is willing to make, except that there are nearly 5 years they've done it !!

Check out the Roland VR-760 Combo. It has everything you want EXCEPT for arranger styles. I couple mine with a PSR2000 - great team. The new Roland G70 sounds like an arranger version of the 760, but I have not seen it to give you an opinion, but if they are closely related, then the piano, organ and bass are excellent.

Thank you fellas.

Great suggestions all. I'm off from work today and will google these ideas.

eddy