Thank you all for the contributions and thank you General Music for the new products and last but not least, thank you Nigel for the opportunity.

Hello anyone. Does anyone know what a SK880 IOP is ?

The SK880 IOP is a SK880 tricked out for Praise and Worship. IOP= Instrument of Praise.

NEW Stereo Piano Sample
NEW Praise & Worship Drumkit
NEW Bass with Playing Effects
NEW Organ Samples
NEW 8 Meg Amazing Grace Demo
NEW Praise & Worship Styles
3 entirely new sound/style blocks

Paul,

very interesting. How come I never heard of this? Where Can I hear a demo? How much and where can I buy it from?

The SK880 IOP was shown at NAMM in January. This was a project that was in the works for a year. I suspect that you already own an SK880, in this case just an upgrade to your board would make the most sence. Your local GEM dealer would be able to have your instrument upgraded, which inculdes a Hard drive swap, some re-wiring, and a new E-Prom.

I am working on having an Audio Demo of the IOP avilible online to have a listen too.

Paul,

Thanks for the info. Just to let you know that I also have the oriental kit. Also there are some flash styles included with my current setup that are my all time favorites. Can I keep all of this?

Shall I ship my keyboard to GEM distributer in IL?

Unfortunatly you can not have Both an IOP and a Oriental upgrade. Either or, not both. A suggestion would to get the genesys or genesys pro and midi with the SK880 and have an incredible rig. I personally like to have a weighted action and a set of synth keys to play.

Dear SK880user, if and when you get the IOP upgrade for your keyboard, would you be willing to give a report on what you think of it ? Thanks. ( esp. the new piano sound ).

dogman,

Hello to you. I have found out that I won't be able to keep my oriental kit if I upgrade to IOP. Oriental kit is very important to me to write music that depicts middle eastern/arabian cultures. Therefore, I will not be upgrading. I wish there is a way I can upgrade without losing the oriental sounds and styles. Maybe it is time for new keyboard afterall. I recently got laid off, so I cannot afford to buy a keyboard now, but maybe later.

Paul and SK880 User,
If you can put the additional RAM(standard SIMMS) into the SK880 in addition to the 8MB flash ram, then you should be able to have both the oriental kit and the Praise features. You would just have to load the oriental kit from the hard drive (single block) each time you turn on the keyboard. Isn't this possible? As far as I know, the only difference is that the additonal simms are volatile (erase when you turn off the keyboard) and the 8MB flash is non volatile (samples stay when you turn off the keyboard and are ready to go when you turn on the keyboard.
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California

George, I talked to Joe and he sounded pretty confident that you couldn't have both at the same time. Now this was a while ago when I posed the question, but the reason was something on the lines of they put the sounds in the same block, and use all the usable memory, and something to do with the Arabic drum kit. Since I have never played with an Oriental Sk880, I honestly am not sure. I've sent an email to Chris... So we'll see, if he doesn't know.... Hell has froze over.

George you are correct, I am glad you questioned this.... I guess I should have gone to the source and asked Chris. Now the question I will have to get answered, is will they do this kind of upgrade. I will get that answered for you on Monday.

This is the responce I got back from Chris Anthony.

The simple answer is "yes, they can be used together". George Kaye is correct in saying that you can install both if you add some additional sample RAM. Of course this would mean that you would need to load one of them (either IOP of Oriental), every time you power up the keyboard.

It's not difficult however to run both kits simultaneously in the same 8Mbyte DRAM, it's just a matter of deleting one or two voices that you won't miss and then they'll both fit. For example, the Arabic Kit contains 2010Kbytes of sampled sounds but only 321Kbytes of these are actually necessary for operation of all 16 styles. The remaining 1689K breaks down thus:

Accordion1 52K
Cawala 212K
Aoud 1 524K
Aoud 3 314K
Aoud Tr 210K
Nay 211K
Bozouki 166K

The IOP only loads up 7907Kbytes of the available 8M DRAM (leaving 285k free). The IOP contains only one sound which is not used by any of the styles (Cool Alto) but deleting this would yield a further 440k of space. So now you have the IOP loaded, the Cool Sax deleted and 725K of empty space. That's enough to get the necessary sounds for all 16 oriental styles and at least one of the above voices loaded without needing additional RAM. If you wanted to get the whole Arabic Kit in, including all the sounds, you could remove one or two of the larger IOP sounds - substituting them with regular WK/SK sounds in the styles where they are required. For example, the IOP's "Rich Strings" is 1091K and "El Bass SK" is 625K. Just deleting and substituting these two sounds would give you space for the entire Oriental kit in one 8Mbyte DRAM along with the IOP.

Paul,
What Chris has explained is exactly what I did to a WK6 I have in my store. The WK6 in my store only has the stock flash ram (2MB). I had loaded into it the arabic kit which fits fine. Then, a few months ago I received an Iranian drum kit which I wanted to have in my flash memory because this WK6 does not have any additional simms installed. After calling Chris we figured out that those sounds not used in the actual arabic styles would not be necessary for me to keep in the flash so that I could delete these and have enough room for the iranian drum kit samples. I then just found the single sampled sounds I didn't want and deleted them and then I added the new sampled sounds I did need and then after loading everything the way I wanted it I saved this as a new "block". If I would have had the 8MB flash I could have kept all the arabic sounds, loaded in the Iranian samples and styles and then saved this whole block. I did this in the Genesys because the genesys has 16MB of flash memory allocated for samples so I now have all the arabic and all the iranian in the genesys.
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California