Tom, after two days with the SD1 I think I can start to make a few statements. The first one is that this thing has some really great styles. I won't tell you anything to spoil the surprise, but I have already at least five songs ready in my mind to be arranged and recorded. Last week, after I had recorded "Michelle", an anonymous friend, thinking that I had an X1, wrote me to suggest that I could use the Fox Ballad 1 or 2 as styles for that song. Now, with the SD1, I have tried them and indeed they would work great. Maybe in the future I will record again Michelle with the same arrangement and instruments, but this time on the SD1, to let you all hear and compare the sounds. What I can tell right now is that both the VA7 and the SD1 have great acoustic pianos; the SD1 piano has more edge (is more brilliant) and, besides, even if I am not by no means a piano player, I think that, to play a good piano, one needs a weighed or semi-weighed keyboard (like the SD1). The electric pianos are a bit disappointing, though, and so are the electric guitars; you know that I am a big Santana fan, but even if the SD1 has a preset called "Carlos", it's nothing more than an electric guitar with distortion applied (nothing to do with the Overdrive guitars of the VA7). The acoustic guitars, on the other hand, are very good, and I hope that I will at last be able to play some nice acoustic guitar solos. Another plus of the SD1 are the Hammond organs and I have seen that on the hard disk there are quite a few, really good.
That's all I can say for now, but I have to add that many sounds or programs can be tweaked in a many ways and besides, if you consider that if you don't like a sound you can always sample another one (and I have tons of samples from my Akai and Ensoniq samplers...and now I have an 8 Gigabyte hard disk to store them, and effects to process them at will.....)
I just hope that I won't fall back in my old habit to sample and edit sounds instead of playing, which is much more fun!
Best regards,
Andrea
Previous Topic
Index