Bill, I agree with you..I still find Pianissimo to be great..

Sorry, Arranger (got a shorter name we can use? ) but you apparently have no idea how powerful the K2500 is. You can modulate ANYTHING with anything, and then use that to modulate something else! Including breath control.

It is the most flexible hardware synth I have ever used, and still to this day astonishes me by being able to do the most whacked out things I could ever ask it to...

as I said before, Kurzweil keyboards are not unknown to me. Even so, the sounds of the K2500 are not to be compared to what we are talking about here. These keyboards were some of the best in their heyday, but let me say that at that price ,a Kurzweil now would be at the bottom of my list.

You, on the other hand, have no idea how much more powerful is a library like Eastwest's Symphony Orchestra compared to the orchestral sounds on the K2500. My point is simply that Wivi offers a degree of playability that I have not heard about before on PC. You can talk about the K2500 as much as you want, but the fact is, we are talking about sample libraries and software, not hardware workstations. The K2500 is a great instrument, but certainly not the best and with that money I can buy better, a Liontracs is a case in point.

Frankly, even a Roland Juno G is a killer modern workstation and has more features than the K2500 , at about a fourth of the price or less. Does it have the breath controller? Don't know. What is important to me is not the breath controller per se, but the fact that ,as in the Wivi video, I can control a lot of real ACOUSTIC (not synthesized) nuances with a breath controller. On the K2500 ,what can you control? LFO, vibrato, filter cutoff?
Wow. Big deal.

[This message has been edited by arranger_yes_pc_no (edited 10-21-2010).]

These days I wouldn't praise a Kurzweil for anything other than VAST and even at that it's getting old. You can't keep praising them for the same technology for every you know. As an OASYS user I'd have even less interest than most as the OASYS is a far deeper workstation that even the hard core programmers would find themselves left with their heads spinning.

VAST in my opinion is also a wasted technology on a range of keyboards that carry very dated specs and high price tags. The PCM data even sounds dated for many sounds and is likely very limited as they won't even tell you how much the keyboards have.

VAST is also not exactly utilised when producing real-world sounds. So... what's so interesting these days about a Kurzweil ?

A triple strike Piano sound ?

Well, there's plenty of better options these days in every accept of what Kurzweil have to offer. They don't really have a lot going for them.

Heck even the factory sounds on a Tyros 4 put any Kurzweil to utter shame. It's old technology.....yawn.

James

Sorry, James, but I built a pretty extensive library for my K2500... most of the TOTL Kurzweil and Akai libraries, including a lot of custom breath controller stuff, and have it tweaked to death! It still impresses most of my clients, and, in all fairness, was the basis of MANY, many hits from the nineties that still impress to this day (not that I played them, but the Kurzweil did...!).

You see, for me, it's NOT about having the latest greatest. It's about having something 'good enough' that I am intimately familiar with... That being said, I do agree that there are more sophisticated tools out there, and for pure synthesis, the old K2500 has long been surpassed. But the list of players WELL out of our leagues that still continue to play them is long and storied.

Hollywood scores were recorded on them. Countless hits were recorded on them. That's good enough for me.

If I need anything past its' capabilities, then I've got quite a few VSTi's for synth stuff (big fan of much of the Arturia stuff) or I can use Kontact, etc.. But my primary library was built in the nineties, was TOTL for its' time, and still satisfies most of my clients. Hollywood comes knocking (fat chance!) I'll run out and get the latest greatest... Until then, what I have does the job!

Hi Diki



Diki, it's only my opinion but I strongly believe that not even the official demo's on their website right now sound remotely close to what Yamaha are doing with the Tyros 4.

Bearing in mind that the Tyros 4 also has the most basic crud ass engine going, it still puts VAST to shame in the demo's I'm hearing. VAST is wasted because Kurzweil don't have anything much of good quality to feed through it and I bet the reason for that is PCM space is pretty much like the rest of their specs. Dated and low spec...!!!!



Sure, I personally don't believe any keyboard has a “use by date” that makes it obsolete after a certain amount of time but it is sad to see the state of the new keyboards they are releasing.

Kurzweil are sitting on one of the top sound engines and they can't make it produce anything current because things like the PCM data are very limited and the content is dated.

It's a crying shame. They just appear to lack money to develop the technology and seem to be hoping to sell new products based on the good old days.



Yes, in the 90's everyone was using them for soundtrack work but since then they have been hugely left behind. When a keyboard with a crap sound engine like the Tyros 4 clearly produces a better and far more realistic sound in my opinion, then that's a sad day for Kurzweil.

Really, how wrong is that when Kurzweil have one of the top sound engines. ..!!!!!



Just so you know, I'm not putting down your K2500. I'm just saying that Kurzweil have gone almost nowhere since the 90's. It's a great keyboard, but today current range are only slightly better and they still sound like something from the 90's.

Regards
James

[This message has been edited by Irishacts (edited 10-21-2010).]

Well, as I thought you would gather from my first line or so, I am NOT using much of the built-in sounds..! So, in a way, for me it's much like your old Akai S5000 (was that the one?). Only as good as the library you put into it.

I've got Siedlek, I've got Kirk Hunter, I've got many of the old TOTL orchestral libraries, and, even though they don't compare to perhaps the BEST of the current crop, few of my clients are so picky that the sound alone is the deciding factor... Just like arrangers, it still boils down mostly to the PLAYING and orchestration.

You posted some GREAT stuff you had done on the Akai a little while back... Are you ashamed of it? Of course not! Despite it being stone age compared to what you have now. Great music is mostly independent of the means of production. There are old Hollywood film scores done on old Emulators. They don't sound any WORSE than the day they were released.

I know full well that I could be using libraries and software that completely blow my old system away. But they would cost me THOUSANDS to get (VSL ain't cheap, you know!) and thousands more in hardware to run them, and would not get me another client more than I already have. If what I use is good enough for THEM, well, it's good enough for me!