I swallowed hard when Fedex delivered it with a big hole in the side of the box, but all looked well inside. Phew.

I love the light weight, and the bright touch screen is awesome. I had a Pa2X, and this is much larger and more sensitive.

It took me quite a while to work out the global settings I needed, having had a Tyros 4 for the last 21 months. And then looked for the save to global. Eventually I figured out that you no longer need to do that, it keeps your global and locked settings in memory even when you turn it off. Cool.

The Master EQ frustrated me for a while, since I seemed to be making changes but nothing happened. Finally I realized that you need to turn Master EQ ON, and then the thing came alive. I set mine at +1.5/0/+1.5/+3.0 for the internal speaker configuration and I am very impressed with the sound, both the overall volume and clarity. I’m going to try using it in smaller locations with the internal speakers alone.

I played around with the mic settings but at this moment I am perfectly happy with the default settings for my Countryman E6 mic. Experience in different locations will refine this, but making the changes is easy. I do quite a bit of talking during the program, and setting up Talk on one of the assignable switches takes the reverb down to a natural level. I wish the light would stay lit when selected, so that I could see the setting it was in (On or Off – there’s no indication on the touchscreen either). At the moment it lights briefly when you touch it, either way.

I erased the factory songbook and started my own, and once again it was tricky to work out how to save the settings you need, but once I figured it out setting up the next songs were a piece of cake. I loved the reworked styles that I was used to playing, and the sounds were great, the new Concert Grand Piano, Real Strings, Concert Strings, Movie Strings, Trumpet Expr. are awesome. Again making changes to the styles to my taste is relatively straightforward (eg changing out distortion guitar for more strings in a Rock Ballad style). I love the Korg sequence Pads, especially the Piano Arpeggios and Strings, and have really missed them on the Tyros. I never managed to find the time to find them (I’m sure they are out there) but the ones I love are right there in the Korg menu.

I couldn’t get enough done to set it up for tomorrow’s gigs, shame, but I saved all my work to a USB drive (just in case). I can’t wait to put it through its paces in a real situation. So far, I am thrilled.

Thanks, keep the impression coming! Congrats.

Graham,

Thanks for the feedback looks like the Pa900 is going to do the job for you. Congratulations!

Well, I came home from my morning gig and just pushed myself to do enough to get ready to take the new keyboard out in the afternoon. I'm glad I did, since I learned a lot! But I also got good feedback from the activity staff on the sound, phew!

Personally, I am struggling with the keyboard feel. I have got used to being able to apply virtually the same pressure at the inside of the key as to the outside, and that won't work with the Pa900. It is much more like a weighted piano key. I remember that about my earlier Korg Pa's, but that's going to be a re-learning process for me!

The Talk button worked well for me, but I was struggling to remember to press it after playing and before playing again. On further examination, I find that there is a menu option that will apply this automatically for you when you stop playing and turn the Talk feature off when you start up again. How cool is that!

O boy, do I love that songbook. It is time-consuming to set up all the different settings for each song, but once that's done the song is easy to find, and even better you can easily create a playlist for the gig you're playing.

I can't wait to get out tomorrow morning!

Graham,
Try lowering the effects knob instead of using the "talk" button- it's right there for instant use.

Hi Guy's

Try setting talk to auto (manual page 247) it automatically changes when the style stops.

Col

That's a good option Dave, it's an immediate visual indicator too!

I'm looking forward to seeing how Auto works this morning.

The problem with that setup is that you can never sing with the arranger off and still have your effects on your voice. I do lots of stuff without, before and after the arranger section gets turned on. In fact, I never use the talk button at all - if I have to talk for more than a few words ... I'll just lower the effects knob.

I see now Dave why you prefer that approach. I almost always have the arranger on when singing, and talk quite a bit between songs, so it seems an attractive option at the moment.

However time and real-time use will make the decision for me.

Is there any online comparison between the PA900 and the PA3X? Or is it just the colors?

Oh my, there are so many differences between the two!

1. Build quality - aluminum(3x) vs plastic(900)
2. Controllers, sliders(3x)
3. dedicated outputs(3x)
4. Top line vocal harmonizer and XLR mic preamp(3x) vs LOW END mic pre/harmonizer(900)
5. More USB slots(3x)

just to name a few ....

Dave may you should of kept the 3x..and worked on getting some kind of monitoring speaker system instead to keep the vocals in your face vs the lower quality on-board speakers that you require to perform, you don't sound too thrilled with this KB so far, wheels spinning? ......

Nope - the silent slab was worse for me. I'll figure this out. I need a one piece unit for cocktail hour type parties. For more important vocal situations, I'll just have to carry the right gear. This kb is working out great in all other respects. I'd never give up the speakers for the sliders and vocalizer.

Thank you Dave for the comparision list. I am sTILL leaning toward KRONOS or PA3X. tHANKS

The 3x is fantastic in the studio, or played through a good monitor system. My needs are not very conventional, I admit. The Korg design is so deep with editing capabilites, it's hard to go wrong for a studio piece.

Graham,
having owned the Korg PA2-X Pro, could you comment more specifically on the differences in sounds, key-feel and styles between the two?
Also, how is it working with an SD card instead of an hard disk? For example, how much faster is the boot-up time or to load samples?
Thanks

Hi Dreamer, it's a little tough to be specific on style and sound comparison to the Pa2X since I have had a Tyros 4 for 2 years, but I am loving the Pa900. The styles are very natural and well balanced, and I have been able to find sounds very quickly that sound good to my ear.

Obvious differences like the significantly lower weight is a great plus for me, even though I miss the 76 keys, but then I've coped just fine with the Tyros, arranged some pieces in different keys to accommodate.

I personally have been struggling with the keybed feel, because it is so different from the Yamaha. It reminded me of the feel of the Pa2X in that, as I mentioned above, you have to use quite a lot of pressure if you play the key at the inside. The Pa2X had a longer key movement, closer to a piano. With large hands it's easy to get to the inside, especially on the black notes, if you are playing a fuller right hand part. I have changed the sensitivity to soft, and am confident that I'll get used to it. Btw, I seem to be alone in this, others like the fact that you need to exert more pressure.

There is a hard disk installed, I believe the SD card is an option, and have not looked at that. I use a USB stick to update the OS and to backup what's on my hard drive.

Boot-up time is slow compared to the Tyros, frankly it does not seem much quicker than the Pa2X, but that's really not a problem as long as the keyboard is reliable once powered up! I'm praying that will be the case.

Graham,

I have the SD card installed (16 Gb) and a USB stick - when the USN to PC is "Enabled", the Korg disk show 1 Gb capacity and the SD card shows 15 Gb and the USB stick does not show up. That seems strange to me that Korg does not give us access to the USB stick via this connection as it sure would give some extra organizing ability to have that access.

I also had three different Tyros keyboards and really loved the feel of those keybeds and their after touch too, but I have spent some time with this keybed on the Pa900 and find it is okay too now.

BTW, I don't think anyone makes a i Gb hard disk these days, do you? ;-)

Bill G

Thanks Billy, I'll look into that. 1Gb is crazy, I'm throwing away all my old USB sticks lower than 4Gb!

Graham,
since you mentioned having had a Tyros 4 for two years, may I ask what made you change to a PA-900?
Thanks

By the way, I have been reading the user manual and there are a few interesting points: in no place is mentioned an internal HD, but it's specifically said that an external HD can be connected through the USB port; speaking of which, the PA-900 has two of them (one "host" and one "to device") and they are both 2.0, while in the PA3-X the connection to device is only 1.1 (hence the painfully slow transfer rate between internal HD and PC).
But, as far as the storage devices go, here is what the manual says:

Name Media type

DISK [KORG DISK] User-accessible area of the internal memory. This is where you can store Songs and other files.

SD [KORG SD] Optional microSD card inserted into the rear slot.

SD [KORG SD2] Optional microSD card inserted into the rear slot
(second partition).

USB memory device (like a memory stick) connected
to the rear USB Host port

So, compared with the PA3-X, looks like they added a few things but took away others; another important difference, for example, is in the sampling section: you can load samples and edit them but you apparently cannot sample your own sounds. So, more than a full fledged sampler, the one in the PA-900 looks like a sample reader, more or less like the one in the Tyros 4.
The big advantages of the 900 are the low price and the low weight: combined with some features, more up-to-date than even the PA3X, they make the whole package really interesting.

Hi Dreamer, I loved my Pa2X and the SongBook, and frankly I made a mistake going to the Tyros 4. I am so happy to be back to the Korg interface and sound. The driving force was I really wanted to lighten my load and simplify my setup, and especially when I do really small jobs where I plan to use the internal speakers only. Then the price of the Pa900 made it a no-brainer

Btw I believe the interface on the Pa900 is simpler, there is not the Global save element; it just remembers the way you set up the global options. Maybe there is a benefit in the Pa3X interface, but not for me. I like this simplicity.

OK, I've been saving backups to the internal disk and copying them to a USB. Obviously that will run out of space soon, so I've ordered a 16GB microSD. No big deal, only $13.58 and it looks simple to install.

Graham,

I bought the 16 Gb SD card and it is very easy to install and you can access it from your PC by way of the Media - USB tab.

Works a treat.

Bill G

TBH... how many of us actually sample our own sounds? Using a keyboard, no less! That's pretty 20th century thinking, there!

Most of us simply want to be able to import sample sets already made, and having access to standard multisample formats is paramount. Soundfont and Akai are the two big ones, if memory serves me. This is where Yamaha screwed the pooch, getting greedy and only allowing their (mostly unsupported) own proprietary format for multisample import. Having 'Wav import is all well and good, but that's ONE sample at a time. A good drum kit or piano can be HUNDREDS of samples, mapped to keys and velocity ranges. I doubt many of us have the skill and patience to import each one by hand and map it..!

Overall, I think the PA900's decision to just have multisample import but not the actual recording is a wise one. Few of us sample instruments, and even fewer would do it on a keyboard if they had a computer handy (and who doesn't? LOL). Just as long as the full list of PA3X import standards made it to the PA900, you are good to go.

Diki,

No doubt about it, Yamahahaha even screwed things up with the Tyros where you couldn't use Motif sound sets either or purchased sounds for the MOtif even tho they both store the exact same info in their waveforms. All bits were reversed in the Tyros waveform just to make them incompatible.

Bill G

Sound fonts are quite old and fall behind on quality these days; in addition Akai samples are getting more and more difficult to come by as they have been pretty much replaced with sample VSTs. (Kontakt being the most popular)

If you want great sound expansion capabilities then to be quite honest the only way to go is to have a VST Host built into the keyboard so that you can have what you want. (I wouldn’t consider any arranger/organ without this basic option built in)

Bill

Well, it is true... But even the closed systems could and probably will offer more and more possibilities for adding good quality sounds.
On the other hand, let's be honest, it is much that can be done with the sounds on-board and yet we all the time want/need more. I guess it's just the human nature. If we understand what an arranger is for and what a VSTi collection is for, we'll have more of a "peace of mind".

There is no standard multisample VSTi format. Although soundfont and Akai are older formats, they ARE formats. No VSTi has the same data format as any other. That's kind of the point to them. The things have proprietary data format, so you HAVE to use that VSTi to have access to those sounds. Gigasampler was starting to become more common, but the problem was that the data sizes were so large, it was an impractical format for hardware samplers.

And while VSTi integration into hardware arrangers is a good idea, in practice it turns out to be VERY expensive and bad business for the arranger manufacturers. To make an arranger that can play VSTi's, you basically have to make an arranger that is an entire regular computer, running a regular computer OS (because that's what the VSTi is designed to run on) and THEN an entire arranger section, probably running on the same OS. So far these have turned out to be either miserable failures (the MS) or prohibitively expensive (the Wersi's).

Let's be honest... NEITHER of these are practical solutions. But the solution exists already... Akai.

Yes, while you can say that the 'best' sounding sampled instruments currently available need streaming hardware and GB sized libraries, let us not forget that there are MANY great sounding sample sets for Akai (probably every hit record before the late 90's used Akai's or maybe Roland or Emulator samplers) and they have one HUGE advantage for hardware arranger samplers... They had limited RAM sizes, so the sounds were very carefully optimized to use as little RAM as possible.

This makes loading them up in hardware samplers a practical thing (you wouldn't want to have to load 1GB just for a piano in a Yamaha!) and allows you to load in a bunch of things into the MUCH larger memories modern arranger samplers have (Akai only had about 256MB of memory even on the late S6000 models - but remember, that's 25 MINUTES of full bandwidth stereo sampling!).

Basically, if you want to use the sampler in your arranger, the Akai format is by FAR the best format to have. I still use much of those libraries in my production work, and some of them are still to be bettered by VSTi's. Something about having limited resources makes the sample producers work MUCH harder to get it to all sound good!

Sure, if money is no object, if integrating a computer into your hardware sampler is easy to you, VSTi's are often (but not always) the way to go. But for the rest of us, Akai still rules the roost. Yamaha, if they want their users to actually start using the sampler much (I doubt more than 10% use it much if at all) need to open it up for Akai import.

The problem is Diki is as I mentioned in my original post, Akai samples and libraries are getting hard to come by, (Do a Google search and you will be shocked just how little there is about these days) if it wasn’t for this I also would recommend the Akai sample route (As I have dome many times in the past) but unfortunately time as moved on. (This Akai format capability is the reason I always had a soft spot for the Korg)

You are absolutely correct about no standard sample player for VSTi, which is why I said a host so as you can choose your own selection, having said that the most common VST sampler is still Kontakt, (It probably has the most samples for it than any other) so arranger/organ manufactures could standardise on this if they wished.

Streaming of samples would not be a problem as all new instruments that come out these days include an SSD as standard, which is faster than a HDD.

Bill

Speaking of Akai, and to bring back the discussion on topic (the Korg PA-900), it is really unfortunate that this instrument (unlike the PA3X) cannot import Akai samples, but only Wav, Aiff, SF2 and also samples in Triton or Trinity format. I understand the need to cut corners to keep the price low, but what could be the added cost of the Akai compatibility is really a mistery to me: maybe it's just to differentiate the two models?
And, speaking of cutting corners, I am afraid that there is more to the PA-900 than the specs say: true, they took away the sampler section, the separate outs, the digital in/out and so on, but I think that there are also other, hidden, differences. If you go to korgpa.com and listen to sound samples of both the PA-900 and the PA3X, you will probably notice that they don't sound the same. The comparison is easier for some instruments (like the grand piano, the trombone and the acoustic bass), that use the same song (most likely a midifile). To my ears the PA3X sounds more defined, "rounder" (or less harsh, if you prefer). The trombone, for example, has more bottom end and at first I thought that it had a different equalization, but then realized that this greater presence was found also in the mids and the highs. I don't know if it's a matter of different D/A converters, filters or effect section (the PA3X can have up to 8 MFX together, vs 4 on the PA-900), but there is definitely a difference.
I guess that, once again, it's true that you get what you pay for...

I'm a dummy when it comes to this. How would I get a couple decent electric guitar samples (Strats?), comparable to Yamaha or Roland, but not necessarily with all the gimmicks, into my PA3X. I would ALMOST buy another S950 just for the lead guitar sounds, and use it as a second keyboard.
I suppose find Akai samples, then put them onto a USB stick, THEN read the directions in the manual?
I really don't care about having them for style parts, just lead instruments. Any suggestions as to an easy way?
DonM

I think if you start looking at USED sample disks... Akai stuff is out there.

I guess, most PA900 users need to start to get REAL friendly with PA3x users, so they can do the raw import and then finish off the programming in the PA900.

Call me when "almost" becomes "SOON"

Your 950 is waiting for you in Philly.

Pa900 is about half the price of Pa3x.
Given that aspect, I find the instrument absolutely amazing.

Now that I have the Vocal problem addressed, the 900 sounds fantastic in my rig. I have been getting raves at work all week.
Thumbs up!

Congrats Dave I knew you could do it ...too bad you cant get in in an "ALL IN ONE" unit....good luck out there.

Yeah, I guess the "Uncle Dave Signature" model hasn't been endorsed yet. That would be a sweeeeeet board.
(for ME, at least!)

So Dave, how did you finally resolve the vocal processor issues?

Graham,
I bypassed the internal unit altogether and bit the bullet for a VoiceLive Touch2. It gave me superior harmonies and the added routing to pump my guitar through the internal speakers ... something ELSE I was missing! Now, I can use the same vocal/guitar system whether I have a KB on the job, or not. I like that flexibility.

For really quiet, or short jobs, I can live with the internal processor ... I just don't like it.

Oh, good for you, yes I figured the lack of additional inputs would hurt some guys; I was looking for some tips on how to get the best out of the onboard system.

The VLT2 allows me to feed audio, vocal and instrument all into the Korg's speakers. Pretty cool.

Sounds like to me....you should have tried the PA600, at half the price

Naw ... the new one has better speakers, and when the small, 1 hour deals arise - the mic input beats lugging another piece around. Sonetimes, it's very unimportant how loud and beautiful the mic is, but not often. I'd miss the 2 players and I'm sure other things as well. The 900 just has a better look to it. I love the shape of the body ... too bad it's not a redhead!