I spent the day yesterday visiting Korg, Yamaha, Ketron and Roland. The NAMM show was very crowded for an opening day and especially after a rather slow year in the music industry around the world.
My first stop was by Korg. There I was greeted by Malcolm Doak, product manager from Korg USA and the head of Korg Italy and the head designer from Italy of the entire PA line of products. I fell in love with the new look of the PA2XPRO, with it's wood sides and it's sleek pop up, motorized display. Wonderful for those needing to adjust the display to suit their needs.
The content of styles and sounds in the PA2XPRO is the same as the PA800 but the addition of an additional drawbar, hard drive, MP3 player and much more sample memory and a price almost the same as the PA1XPRO is a welcome addition. Korg also showed me a new read only flash drive which in this case was loaded with Turkish and Arabic styles and sounds, which will go on sale soon here in the US and around the world. These drives can not be duplicated in a computer and saved on blank drives because Korg has designed them that once you've loaded the set, the drive itself must be in the keyboard when turning on to initiate the auto load feature, even though the set is stored in the Solid State Memory.
Korg has also announced to me that in a short time, they will release a software program on their
www.korgpa.com website allowing musicians to convert PA80 card sets in their own computers to work as sets in the PA800 and PA2XPRO models. This is something that the user has not been able to do until now. I was also told that the load time of sets in this new model will be about twice as fast as on the PA800 because of the fact that samples will be retained in the hard drive rather than in the solid state memory which will allow for quicker load times.
The new PA500 is a welcome addition. The sounds and styles of the PA800 but without the virtual draw bar mode, the vocal harmonizer and the sampler. There is an SD card slot on the back. This new model is made in Korg's China factory and the price is only $1499.00.
The PA50 will continue in the line but with a reduced price now at just $899.00 MAP here in the USA.
All in all, I'm very impressed with the direction Korg has taken to provide many high quality models in many price ranges.
Korg is making a big effort to rename these products Songwriters workstations rather than arranger workstatations in an effort to get more musicians interested in buying hardware based workstations rather than computer based software. Korg is correct that fewer and fewer musicians are buying keyboards when they've been told that the computer can do it all! Being in the retail business for 38 years, I know how many fewer musicians come into the store now looking for new keyboards and are just asking about software. I hope Korg's advertising campaign works to bring a new breed of musician into our stores!
A walk over the Ketron was next......what a long walk! Last year, Ketron was changing ownership of their distributor here in the USA and they gave up their booth which was right in the heart of the keyboard area (All the way at the far side of the arena). They ended up going upstairs to a very quiet area last year where there were very few exhibits, or people. So this year they ended up all the way on the other side of the arena, right in the middle of the drum exhibits! So, it was pretty loud!
I was very pleased to see that Ketron brought the Audya and also had someone doing demo's with a Midi Guitar, an Accordion and middle eastern demo's on their new Vega EX4 and their New SX3000 Turkish.
The Audya looks great (much like the Korg PA2XPRO) and what I heard sounded very good. It is still in it's prototype stage and will not be available for some time. There is still no mention of price. It's capabilities are excellent for making wave files, MP3's and it's use of real audio files for style tracks was demo'd hearing the guitar tracks of real strumming mixed in with styles. I also heard the "riff" styles being used as used in the SD5.
Roland only had one new keyboard, the R-09 I think was what it was called. It is basically a GW7 ($695) with built in speakers and sells for $549. The only real difference I could see was that there is no USB and no floppy disk so there is no way to load or transfer data. I do think that is sounded great and will have a place for people only interested in the content of the keyboard and just want to play it for fun, or because of it's new white look, it might find it's way in to many church markets.
Yamaha only showed their new version of the YPG625, and YPG525 keybords which now have gone to 64 note polyphony rather than 32. I didn't notice any other differences. There is also a new version of the PSRE403, now called the 413.
There were some cool new products. Yamaha has come out with a stereo recorder the size of a USB Thumb Drive for $399 which can record for over 4 hours and has built in stereo mics and can be used with an options outboard stereo mic.
The new Roland Fantoms are simply awsome to look at and to use, with their huge displays and mouse control. The new engine is twice as powerful as the old one.
Korg came out with a little battery operated touch control surface synthesizer which is a gas to play with.
More to follow
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George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California
818-881-5566
www.kayesmusicscene.com
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