Dear Mr Kaye
In one of your postings you distinguished between standard and oriental X1. What did you mean by oriental X1? And is it comparable in price to the standard X1? I hear that Solton produced an oriental scale converter, which is poorly built, is this true?. Finally, how does oriental X1 compare to the oriental WK8?

Nabil Aziz


[This message has been edited by naziz (edited 10-18-2000).]

Nabil,
the X1 oriental kit comes with 6 disks and a flash ram card.
3 disks are styles
1 disk is user voices
1 disk are demo songs
1 disk is the new oriental "Live Oriental"
operating system.
1 8 meg flash ram card has 4 oriental drum
kits and many middle eastern sounds.

The live oriental operating system offers many new features. The most noticable being tempo changes using the volume up and down buttons for each part. This gives you tempo up and down by numbers of 5 just by touching the different voice volume buttons.
Also, when you load patterns into the pattern memory you now have choices of groups which allow you to change patterns instantly without having to wait for the measure to end before changing, or, you can still load patterns into the pattern memory which will only change when the end of the measure comes up. Also, the into/ending buttons will only play intro's with the oriental operating system which allows middle eastern styles to use intros constantly rather than having to worry about an ending being activated. If you want endings, you will use the fade out button which now becomes the ending instead of fade outs.There are other functions in the oriental operating system such as being able to record patterns using 2 drum tracks, one being the middle eastern drums and the other being a regular drum set. this is great because Roland, and others can't do this. I think the WK8 can use more than one drum kit, but I'm not sure.
The mix of styles include traditional and modern arabic styles and the user voices include all the regular middle eastern instruments such as kanoon, oud, tremelo oud, mizmar, nay, cawala, accordian, strings. The oriental kits are designed for both recording patterns (two different ones) and for playing live percussion from the keyboard (two of these). There is a whole sampled set of womens voices speaking arabic which can be played along with the percussion.
When I first got these in, my only disapointment was that the patterns had more percussion then musical tracks. there is always a bass line and usually a guitar or keyboard track, but the programmer could have really voiced these things great because the ability is really there! However, some of my customers have come in and brought me some of there great armenian, etc. patterns they have created and they sound great! How would I compare this to the WK8 oriental? Well, here's what I think........
The factory styles in the WK sound better orchestrated compared to what comes out of the box on the X1. The demo song on the WK8 really sounds great, where the 5 demo songs on the X1oriental are basically never more than 1 or two tracks. There is no quarter tone tuning box here in the US yet but I hear it's coming. I know the AS1 Generalmusic box works really well. The oriental sounds in the WK8 and the X1 are pretty even, although some of my customers prefer the X1 and some prefer the WK2 or WK8. The percussion is more live and real on the X1.
Again, what I have to say is that the potential is really there on the X1 if you program your own styles or if Solton will develop more styles. Eddy Kanoon, the programer of the X1 Oriental kit in Lebanon, says he can program anything I would like for customers so I have written him to see what he can come up with. In the meantime, I'm getting new styles from my customers.
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, Ca.