Folks I was just thinking..., I've listened to so many demos from the top notch keyboards like the SD-1, 9000 Pro, Tyros, PA-80, VA series ect, and I thought to myself, geez the sounds on these keyboards are so lifelike.. With good recording gear, and a talented player it's so hard to tell the difference with the digital instruments now.. Take the Tyros mega voices, (which I also understand the SD-1 is comparable to), and really listen to those sounds.. When I heard the guitar demos from the Tyros I almost fell out of my chair.. Being a guitar player I'm always picky about how a guitar sound is on a keyboard, and it's just amazing how realistic the sounds are now on these keyboards.. With all the technology we have now, how much more can they actually do to improve the sounds in the future... What will we be comparing sounds to 5 years from now... I just can't see now much further they can go.. Eventually they're going to get to the point of sampling the sound to the highest quality, and then where from there.. How much, or should I say how "more real" can they get the keyboards to sound???? Granted styles are alawys going to improve because of the times, but the guitar, piano, strings, and other standard instruments have the same sound as they always did.. What more can they do to the acoustic voices on a keyboard after they reach the level of "true sound"???? Any thoughts on this one???

Squeak

Squeak,
Make these sounds and styles available at the cost of a PSR550 model. LOL
Starkeeper

and further more,

most people think your a "DJ"... and have NO idea at all of what KB your playing, or even Care as long as it SOUNDS GOOD to them in the audience! And that my friends is very Sad!

One way to look at this is in megabytes... the Tyros has something like 96 MB of sound samples, which is the most of any Yamaha instrument currently. That's a lot for a keyboard instrument under $3,000, but it's not much in computer terms - less than a Zip disk of data in fact. My laptop computer has 512MB of RAM on two chips barely bigger than my thumbnail. So we haven't come close to any technology limits as to where we can go in terms of quality of sound. The current balance seems to be how much development has to go into the mass production of an instrument and it's sound samples versus how much consumers are willing to pay. The Synclavier synthesizers of the 80's used by people like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Sting were far more powerful and realistic sounding than almost anything on the consumer synth market today, but they cost 100's of thousands of dollars. Interestingly, used complete Synclavier systems now sell on eBay for around $8,000 - a bargain but still a heck of a lot more than what a Tyros costs.

I agree with the Pro. There is still room to grow, but the improvement has been admirable. At some point, they're going to be able to create keyboards with better-than-Gigastudio quality sounds with no hard drive noise and stable operating sytems. Imagine: 24 bit, 96khz multi-layer sampling of hundreds of instruments at the push of a button. Choices of dozens of authentic pianos, each sample 2 gigabytes in size. Multiply that by guitars, electric pianos, organs, accordians, basses, drums, strings, horns, woodwinds, choral and synth sounds, and ethnic sounds. Now that will be truly amazing. I think it will take about 20 years to get these features in a low cost keyboard, but eventually it will happen.

Beakybird

Not too long ago, we all thought that the RD1000(Roland) was the greatest piano sound there was. Elton John toured with one ..... it looked cool. In today's world .... it's positively awful ! Some people like the DX7 "trumpet" patch. Trumpet? I don't think so !
It's all in how you look at things. There is ALWAYS room for improvement.

You want to ponder a real tough one? How about the fastest mile run? You'd think that each year a 1/2 second could be shaved off, right? But where does it end? How many 1/2 seconds before it actually becomes a ONE minute mile? Things that make you go hmmmmm?

When will they (Synth maker) produced a keyboard with no sounds? We don't need a keyboard with tens of thousands of sounds on it no matter how good the quality of the sound. We want an empty sample playback synth/controller (not even a sampler, we can do it at our pc) that can accept various file format even the mega from Yamaha or just plain wave files. We can create our own sounds or just buy the sounds we want and load it to our empty synth.

I think the future of the arrangers lies in the shifting of its functions to the computer (or integrating a computer into the keyboard.)

The concept (in current terminology) would be a dxi or vst that would sit between the keyboard and a sequencing program like SONAR.

The dxi would be responsible for chord recognition and manipulating the incoming stream from a keyboard which would have the raw capability of assigning all sixteen midi channels to instuments. It would define a split in the keyboard, and would provide a way of designating measures in SONAR as "accopaniment" measures, transposing them according to the chord rec. AI in real time.

There are already samplers that can stream large samples from discs effortlesslly. VSampler and Reaktor are example dxi's for SONAR, although they can't separate the MIDI stream into individual tracks live (yet - I'm bugging them about it....:-)


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www.flamencochuck.com

BTW, there is work going on that is converging on the aboves situation. MAS has some of the above, but you can't use your own samples, and you can't run it as a dxi in SONAR.

Programs like Band-In-A-Box have similar AI, but not applied to live performance. You can play Edirol's software with an arranger like the PA80 within SONAR, but you have to use their samples; and the PA80's are better, in my opinion (but it is fun to experiement).

But I bet in another 5 years, it will come together.

Squeak, for an example of how much better quality is available now ( but not in an arranger ) check out the demo cds from sample co. Spectrasonics. Try selections from "Hans Zimmer guitars" or"Liquid Grooves" or "Retro Funk Drums"or "Vocal Planet ". The quality is astounding. And yes, someday, this quality at psr550 prices! The future is coming on fast and before long we will regard todays' keyboards as quaint toys!
Till then, we can enjoy what we have.
Bill

Its certain that in years to come, even the introductory models for arrangers such as PSR550 will have megavoices, a hundred or more MB of waveforms and plenty of flash storage. I think the future top end keyboards will boast gigabytes of waveform memory together with analog sound synthesis, virtual modelling and direct to flash memory sampling. Styles will incorporate a virtual band, where each instrument will generate virtual arrangements according to taste. Instead of preset styles, the "mood" and genre of music could be chosen and never would any bar sound exactly the same. The accompaniment will analyse how you play and adjust itself accordingly, there would be cubase quality song editing built in with a high resolution colour display, upgradeable OS and of course off line storage such as CDRW or even DVD RAM. The vocal harmoniser would transform your voice into any number of virtual performers, including famous vocalists!
Seriously though, the technology we have already seen in the megavoice guitars (actually its not really new technology, just new methods of using existing principles) will be put into further sounds. We will see megavoice piano, sax, brass, flutes, drums, you name them! Of course new sound compression methods and cheaper memory storage will make this possible. I also think arranger keyboards should consider employing new sound synthesis methods for creating "different" and original voices. On the subject of voices, maybe we will see more "human" vocal sounds in keyboards, not just oohs and ahhs but phrase synthesis and virtual singers! For those who dont want to play along with beats all the time, we could expect a virtual pianist to accompany your performance, or a virtual guitarist where the accompaniment consists of guitar or piano say with no fixed tempo or repetitive melodies. The player should be able to interact more with the accompaniment, touch buttons along the underside or above the keyboard (or pedals) could trigger changes in the arrangement, say causing the bass player to change a riff, the drums to change style, trigger a solo or whatever.
Digital effects would be available individually for every track of the sequencer, so you could record every voice in a multitrack arrangement without losing its quality. There would be heaps of polyphony, and in an attempt to create a more separated sound for the instruments in the keyboard, plenty of individual outputs.
For the portable fanatics, high density lightweight battery packs that are rechargeable (Li technology perhaps), higher quality internal speakers with high efficiency low power consumption amplification. Keyboards would be upgradeable aka PC, with plug in boards and interchangeable components!



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Simon G.K. Williams
simon@svpworld.com
Creative Music & Multimedia
http://www.svpworld.com
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