A few thoughts on M-Audio Key Rig, which arrived yesterday and I've spent a good number of hours with now.

First and most important for me was the acoustic piano sounds are above average right out of the box and highly tweakable. It took me an hour of fiddling to come up with the right combinations between Natural Grand and Concert Grand using the sweepable EQ to cut a little midrange tone plus tweaking the reverb before I came up with something I really liked, but at least it was possible! It's not the best piano in my collection but it's in the top five and both my wife and I were impressed with the sound I finally came up with. I also came up with a nice piano + strings patch with strings coming from the GM module - more on that in a minute.

Other sounds out of the box were terrific: the Rhodes piano sound is one of the best emulations I've ever heard and is completely authentic. Wurli sound was equally good but I'm a Rhodes man so I was very pleased with that patch and couldn't stop playing it.

The polysynth module is fine but not especially noteworthy. I'm probably jaded from hearing too many polysynths lately.

The organ is killer and is right up there with NI's B4 IMHO. It beats B4 in one respect: the rotary simulation switch works like it should with my X-Station spring-loaded mod wheel... I bump it right and it speeds up, bump it left and it slows down. B4 requires me to hold that darn mod wheel to the right for fast speed: yuck. I'd buy Key Rig for the organ alone - it's that good.

The GM module is about average: not great and not terrible but I wouldn't use it. I can't seem to get any sequencer program to MIDI to it and I've tried several tricks including MIDI-OX but no dice. So I haven't heard any SMF's play on it but playing the individual sounds convinced me that it's no better than any old version of Roland VSC. In other words, it's not what we're looking for. It would benefit greatly from having it's own SMF player built-in.

Overall Key Rig is quite cool. I was able to play my backing MP3 files on Sound Forge and use Key Rig for the lead keyboard stuff and they sounded excellent together and didn't hog the CPU at all. Getting a quality piano/Rhodes/organ/synth rig in one economical package makes Key Rig a great buy.

Jim I agree with most of your views, maybe with the exception of M-Audio's organ module compared to B4..You have a designated controller for the leslie simulator[fast/slow]...I like to use the spacebar [laptop]for this , and B4 allows me to use the other soft keys to make changes live...I can not find any shortcuts with Key Rig's organ module..To me B4 still sounds better, but for the price of KeyRig....everyone should have it..

Jim have you tried muting parts in GM module and use the Piano, synth and organ modules in place..

I use Forte and MidiYoke with no problems...Sequence playback device is VanBasco..

[This message has been edited by Fran Carango (edited 11-12-2005).]

That's saying alot... there's an new B4 ver now:
http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?id=b4ii_us.

I have recently installed Sonar 5 and NI's B4 II on my flr2006 software arranger system. It will be hard to exceed the quality of the B4.....although on my system I have a bug...oh, oh, oh... On some presets my system goes into overdrive (as per my audio mixer)....but I hear no sound. Could be something to do with bats....utilizing frequencies outside of my hearing range. This will need a fix. The workaround is not to use these presets....not a big issue.

Frank, any significant improvement/difference in the B4II over the original B4?

Glenn

Glenn, yes there are improvements but not $99 worth. There are more adjustments you can make and more setups. They include emulations of more speaker cabinets, i.e., not just the Leslie Speakers. I would say there is a slight improvement in the quality of the sound and effects (chorus, distortion & reverb).

Plus there are some bugs as noted above. It shows up in my soundcard mixer window as peaking into the red and yet there is no sound at all coming from the speakers for some of the setups....needs to be fixed. I should be careful what I say. It could well be the combination of my equipment and software that's the real problem...we'll see.