Hey FAEbGBD,
You seem to know a lot about your keyboard. I'm impressed! I'm still learning...I've had mine since August. Can you tell me anything about the Session, or the Bass & Drums board?

I don't have the session board. I've heard some demos though. It sounded good. some nice grand pianos, electric guitars are good, nylon guitar is good, brass leaves something to be desired, a so-so sax. I don't have it because I had more specific needs rather than just better quality of everything. There was nothing on the board that absolutely floored me from listening to demos.

The bass and drums board I do have. This is a swweeett board! Very nice electric basses, fretless, acoustic basses. You can hear string buzzing and such for added realism. Also several artifacts such as slides, slaps, pops, and harmonics are available and can be useful if done tactfully.
Drums are great as well, but somewhat limited for my taste. Plenty of kicks and snares and toms, but few cymbals; highhats, crashes splashes, rides, etc. There is only 1 ride cymbal, with 3 different samples, the bell, and 2 other positions. There is also no brush kits which really disappointed me. The samples available are quite good though; for instance, the toms have a bit of snare resonance in them as they would at an actual kit.
It's almost breakfast time, so I'm signing off. Hope that helped.
I should quickly add there are no electric drum kits to speak of either. No drum machine sounding stuff; pretty much all acoustic drums.

[This message has been edited by FAEbGBD (edited 12-24-2001).]

Thanks, that did help. I just would hate to spend over a hundred bucks on something and be disappointed. That's a lot of money! Maybe I don't have a trained enough ear...but I really don't hear anything THAT bad about the brass on the XP. I hear an aweful lot that the brass sucks on there, but I guess I just don't hear where it sucks, know what I mean? Maybe you could enlighten me a little. I haven't much studied that end of the music spectrum. I'm mostly acoustic and strings and stuff like that.

Thanks again!
-Tracey

Well, I think most people really like the session board. The sounds like pianos, guitars, are definitely better. Again, my only experience for this board is hearing demos. The bass/drums board I like a lot, though it has limitations. I don't know how good it would be for acoustic type folk music. The drums are pretty fat. Good for jazz, funk, and pop. You can make some nice user kits with a mix of stock sounds and expansion sounds.

As far as brass, I just feel that a wind instrument is really hard to capture; especially brass. The trombones are pretty good, french horns suck, too synthey sounding, and trumpets just don't have enough samples. For instance, no samples for doing falls, shakes, half-valve glisses. Plus it's hard to make a nice soft trumpet without totally sucking the life out of the samples. You can't make a nice brassy sound without it sounding all synthey and processed. The high notes are just not very real at all. Filters can only do so much.

BTW, I've had my synthe for almost 2 years, so don't be too impressed. I'm learning stuff from this board all the time.