Well, since I started picking on the Genesys regarding its midi mapping capabilities, I figured I better follow up with an update.
Spent a little over 2 hours with the Genesys this past cold, Saturday afternoon. No salesman, just me inside a practice room with the Genesys. Listened to a lot of the sounds and styles this time around. Man does this thing have a huge selection of sounds or instrument patches. Without a doubt, the number of pre-programmed, professional sounding patches this board comes with is amazing. Styles too although I missed the FUNK styles that my WK8 has. Didn't say they weren't there, just didn't find them. That's one thing I did not get a chance to do was to go through the hard drive and examine the contents. Extra sounds, styles, etc.
Then I started playing with the Music Finder and probably spent most of my time goofing around with that and forgot to look at and hear other things. The Music Finder is a list of songs and when a particular song is pressed, it sets up the styles and sounds accordingly. For instance, JailHouse Rock sets up the instrument with a boogie (or 50's R&R) style and associated sounds (electric guitar, etc.). Now I'm not sure if I would actually use that setup for JailHouse Rock but the fun comes in with what would ya play. So there I am clicking on a song to see what setup is chosen, then thinking about (and trying to play) all the songs I know that would fit. You could easily spend days and days playing with this and not get bored. I liked the feature and I'm glad they went with it.
Something was pissing me off though and I want to share this with you so you don't make the same mistake I did (yep, I admit it, it was my mistake). Everytime I would load a new style and start to play, the right hand or lead instruments were way, WAY louder than the accompaniment (drums, bass, etc.). So there I am grabbing a hand full of sliders and trying to get the volumes to balance. Drums, bass, accomp all the way up. Better but still not right. I figure there must be a fix but where, not in the mixer, not in the edit, where? And then I notice it, sittin' right next to the Main Volume slider is the STYLE/SEQ Volume slider, at less than half volume. Slide it up and whah-lah, the drums are in your face. Another great control...I wish I had that on my WK8.
Lots of new styles, new drum kits, they sound great of course. It's a great keyboard.
Now what would a good review be without a little bit of criticism? I'm hoping this is something that can be fixed in an OS upgrade. I brought along a CD that is for the most part, a copy of my E: drive on my home computer. It has just about all the midi and kar files that I have collected over the years. Lots of files and folders. So I insert the CD into the drive and press the Select button. Up comes the Disk Drives screen, I select CD-Rom and I hear the CD-Rom spinning up to speed. In the left pane is all the folders in the root of the CD, using the arrow keys, I scroll down to the Midi folder and I hit the right arrow key to open the folder (I think you can also hit the enter key to get the same affect, opening of the folder). Nothing happens, yet I hear the CD spinning up again then after 3 or 4 seconds the subfolders appear in the right pane. Okay, so I now scroll down to the T1000 folder and do the same thing again (I've still got more subfolders to go before I get to the files). Same thing, long pause, CD spins and then it shows the subfolders. I finally get to the actual midi files. I guess I just didn't expect the operation to take that long. We're not talking a 2X CD-Rom drive here and I don't think we're talking a 386 processor but that's what it reminded me of. Is it possible to keep the CD spinning at a faster rate to get better I/O times? I just tried the same operation with my computer here at work, no comparison. Not quite instantaneous file access but close. Yeah, I know, we're talking apples and oranges here.
Anyway, that's not even my real point. So I play a midi file directly off the CD. I check the mapping and yes, Real Grand Piano was substituted for Piano1. Great! I think it also substitutes Real Acoustic Guitar too. I didn't get a chance to try out which electric guitars might be substituted and I didn't see any substituting of drum kits. Still picks DK_STD1 which is fine. Well, I should be leaving so I press the eject button on the CD-Rom drive...Nothing. Oh, I figure that the drive might be locked since I was playing directly off of disk. Okay, song is stopped, how about now...Nothing. Okay, I get out of Song play and go to Style play, that should free up the CD. Nope, still no eject. In fact, I didn't get my CD back until I power cycled the board. I thought it was a fluke so I tried it again. Loaded up a song off the CD and chose direct play. Same thing, it's as if the Eject button is disabled. And maybe it is. In fact, there could have been a function on the screen that I had to use but didn't see it. Wouldn't surprise me. Maybe this was fixed in the OS upgrade that this board hasn't had yet.(?)
Bottom line was I enjoyed my time with the Genesys keyboard very much. A couple of quirks that I'm sure have more to do with my learning curve than anything else. Definitely get out there and give this board a try.
mike
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