Recently sold the Roland e50. Was not what I wanted overall, but super nice. Picked up a used/new white P-125 and was blown away with the action and pianos.

Full steam ahead. The DGX-670 is a piano improvement over the 125 - terrific. Throw in some real styles and the ability to record audio within the board itself will be a useful studio tool.

Building my studio to do some recording and videos and I think this is a great addition in having 'fun' too.

Go Lions!

If it's not fun, don't do it!

Good luck,

Gary

GOOD FOR YOU! Glad you are out there having fun and improving your skills. That, for me, at least, it what it's all about.

Thanks so much for the "wise words" concerning my upcoming pacemaker
the other day.

you're always very high on my list of good guys.


Be well,


R

That’s interesting Zuki, I always think of you as a Korg guy. The funny thing is, I am sort of a Yamaha guy for my 61 key arrangers, but for 88 weighted digital arrangers , I use Korg. A Havian and XE 20.

Either way, the DGX- is an awesome board. I’m sure it will serve you very well!

Didn't like the DGX as well as the P-125. Super happy with just playing piano. Yamaha nailed it on this board - it's a fantastic bargain for the keybed and pianos alone.

I have a pro jazz pianist friend that plays a P 125 in mono, and still makes it sound great. Your right, it's a fantastic bargain, and it's nice to step away from the auto accompaniment.

Sold the P-125 and got a Roland DS 76. Carry on....

You know the best way to step away from the auto-accompaniment?

DON’T TURN IT ON! 😂🎹

Every one of us has a fabulous live band keyboard, a decent grand piano, a good Hammond, a plethora of synths and a full orchestra at our beck and call, without needing to go out and buy another keyboard. There’s no rule that says you HAVE to turn on a style, split the keyboard and do one finger chords in the LH!

Just ignore that PLAY button..! 😎

I have DS 76 and have mixed feelings about it. There aren't many 76 key keyboards out there and this one is the most affordable, except for some entry level Yamaha models with limited polyphony. The main piano sound has pros and cons. Pros: my fingers just want to play it, and that's why I bought it. Cons: you may feel that switch between soft touches and hard touches is a bit uneven, like some notes are louder than other. Don't forget to adjust the sensitivety, BTW (key touch, velo curve and curve offset). You can get another piano sound with Axial extension, it sounds more even, but also has some noise, like it was overly compressed.

Sometimes I wish I had extra money back then and bought MODX7 instead, but it would be a lot of extra money and I'm yet to see what MODX is in reality, perhaps there are issues of its own. What I like about Juno DS is that it has a lot of extras comparing to any digital piano, there are a lot of electric piano sounds which are decent, and a lot of sounds in other categories, but I can't say that they are of the highest quality, comparing to what people are used to today while using VST instruments.

But I have been abroad since November away from all my keyboards. I bought PSR-S670 here and looks like I was lucky as there aren't many offers here - if I sell it, I won't get anything as good for this money. At some point it helps when your are stuck with a certain keyboard, like on an island, because eventually nothing is perfect, but it takes time to build a relationship. On the other hand I would be exciced to have here something new, although usually it's enough for me to listen to YouTube demos to realize that everything is basically the same. Well, it's not only PSR I have on this "island" (Kyrgyzstan isn't an island, quite the opposite), I bought a guitar, but currently I'm more interested in making music using a computer. I was never a fan of VSTs and never cared for making music with a mouse (piano roll). But it's hard to deny the opportunities it provides for composing. As Hanz Zimmer says, in order to use a computer as a music instrument, one should take time to study it as such. Actually back in Russia I bought two small MIDI controllers to take them here with me, it was an only option which I could get on a plane without too much trouble. It certainly can't replace playing a normal instrument. Even thought my computer isn't the weakest, I can't play piano sound with sustained notes without getting issues with latency, even while using an external sound card with a proper ASIO driver, so when people say "don't buy a synth/arranger/piano, just buy a MIDI keyboard" it's not always good advice. Maybe more powerful computers handle it better.

Nevertheless, today I finished a small orchestral song which I created using only the stuff which fits into my backpack, and I'm more pleased with the overall sound than I was with what my SX900 produced, but I suspect that music created this way tends to sound more artificial and "soulless". I know that it kind of starts a different topic, but in my head these all subjects are sort of merged with each other, and I don't expect that there'll be a lot of a discussion, I hope to hear on your experience with Juno. 


https://youtu.be/VrXQMx9j7xA

Very nice. I wish I had the talent, training, and playing ability to create this type of music. Sadly, it's too late in my life to start now.

You touched on a number of things in your post worthy of separate discussions and I'm hoping someone will pick one to 'flesh out' for further discussion.

Question....do you feel that using a controller/VSTi robs you of some of the expressiveness achievable in a dedicated (self-contained) keyboard? Does the computer and/or audio interface diminish things like touch response (latency, however small or seemingly imperceptible), natural attack, response, release, etc.? Would love to hear your feelings on the subject.

chas

thank you, Chas. Actually, as Zuki entitled the topic "Full Circle", I feel that my message lies upon the subject, because what I'm experiencing now is distancing from my usual routine while questioning it myself. I hoped that buying SX900 would give me inspiration as it happened when I got previous keyboards, but it didn't happen, although now being away I miss something of my SX900. Certainly it didn't help that after 1 month of playing the keys started to produce noise, I had to get it to a service, and the service was incompetent, so the grease they used gave only a temporary fix, and then I decided to leave Russia (temporary, I hope), thus so far my story about SX900 isn't a happy one :-)

And the music you hear in my video is something I'm learning myself, I don't have any formal training, and I used to think that this kind of work wasn't my cup of tea, that everything shoud be created on the fly, and this approach reminds a lot of an office job. But now I'm thinking maybe it's not a bad thing - an office job. Well, this is me getting older :-)

I think people with really powerful computers don't experience problems with latency, otherwise we wouldn't have so many piano libraries; but I'm yet to check it myself. Some time ago I would've replied to your question with certainty saying that hardware instruments were definately my way to deal with music. Maybe now I feel more like to create music step-by-step, so what felt wrong before now feels okay, and what was exciting in the past, today isn't so much...

But I have to consider that due to the economics I never had a chance to get an instrument of a higher scale, like Tyros, or Genos, or PA4X; maybe if I had all the up-to-date upgrades I would've felt differently by now, but it's not a perfect world; I'm sure that with today's prices for TOTL keyboards people all over the world feel that they are being extorted.

Very nice Sergey,

You sure are a busy guy! Kudos for trying many ways to make music.

Diki mentioned to 'stop the arranger' and use what else it offers. In my opinion and experience, that makes the PA4X very useless, especially 61 keys. I cannot use this board for acoustic pianos, although it has awesome other sounds. It will always be my live board.

The Juno DS is interesting, with a boatload of available Roland sounds for free. (I have the Sweetwater pen that came it). I bought it 2nd hand for $350 and have a blast with it. I'm moving from this because of the 61 keys (good enough price to try out).

But, feet wet and exploring, the FA gives one that next step, with a full 16 track sequencer and many options, including the updated sound engine. I like everything I see about the FA and can only imagine the advancement over the DS - wow. I also enjoyed the video of you playing your FA. The pianos are definitely different that Yamaha.

Sergey, hope you find your new/old home and can settle in soon. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and MUSIC.

zuki

I guess you mean DS, as I never had FA :-)



To tell the truth this is a very difficult sentence for a foreigner to get :-)

I'm thinking now that when there's an option to change one keyboard to another without too much fuss, each keyboard stays in constant competition against all of the others, in other words, there's a lot of room for second guessing; so it's not a trouble if the process is fun for you, but I imagine that there's still some fuss to deal with and that you actually plan to focus on playing it rather then changing it.

The thing is with the most of products that they are intentionally desinged with certain flaws so that there will be motivation to get a more expensive one. In my youth I had to buy certain models because of financial limitations... Well, this is still the case. But when you are young and it is all new to you, it is easy to compromise because you are focused on these new things; when I got PSR-3000 it sounded so different from my previous keyboard, that certainly was mesmerizing, and it was this way with each keyboard before, but not that much with each keyboard after. I think after that there are two options. On of them is to accept that excitement is no longer connected with getting new product, which we can consider as some sort of emancipation. Another option is going to the premium sector, if you can afford it. I currently can't. In case with home pianos, that would be some of TOTL home pianos from Yamaha or Roland... In the same time, we are talking about digital instruments, so they are more or less reasonably priced - it's not art or luxury.

Well, I would hate to influence your decisions when it comes to financial matters, in the same time this is what we do, we talk; and choosing not to say something is also sort of influence.

I'm biased right now for some personal reasons, but speaking my mind, I see two reasons why it's justified to buy some middle-of-the-line instrument: when you are not sure that you are going to play at all (not everyone actually plays), or if it's financially impossible to buy a TOTL, for example, Genos now costs in Russia about 500.000 rubles, while an average income is 25.000 per month, and half of it goes for food, and about 10.000 goes for paying the bills. A lot of people in the world live like that, and that's the reason why actually have decent instruments for $300. But we understand that this is still abnormal, people here understand that a proper paycheck starts at 150.000 rubles, not 25.000 rubles.

Well, you see, something bothers me... it's a night time here; see you later ! :-)

Hi Sergey,

Sorry about the 'pen'/ usb stick I could swear I saw you under the FA-07 YouTube page, but I'll look again. Whichever it was, sounded great.

I buy and sell this stuff and make a few $ with each transaction, as folks here want cash, even if sacrificing price/product. The price I paid for the FA-07 was 1/2 off retail.

One for sure thing - my antics will never cease as long as I'm engaged in music full time and professionally earning an income with it.

Hope to get some demos in one day.........sure!

There are some tricks you can use to make using VSTi’s easier with less powerful computers. Mind you, nowadays even pretty entry level computers (like Mac Mini M2) are so powerful that a lot of the ‘old school’ workarounds aren’t nearly as necessary.

The big problem is, if you want a VSTi to feel like hardware keyboards, you want to set latency as low as you can get away with. But while you have it set that way, now the computer is trying to play the entire project at that super low latency! So the main trick a lot of us used was to render the master mix as a stereo audio file before we get to playing the next part in. Once that is rendered, you turn off ALL the other VSTi Parts, and now the computer is hardly doing anything else (playing that one stereo submit is easy for even ancient computers!).

Once you have settled on the new part and got the MIDI right and edited, render a new ‘master mix’, delete the old one, and work on the next sound. This way, you can probably set your soundcard to sub-5ms latency (which is where I start to feel like I’m playing hardware) and not get dropouts in the VSTi.

But if even all that can’t stop your computer glitching, then it’s probably time to look at a new one. Or investigate other similar plug-ins that are more CPU efficient. Plus many plug-ins allow you to record using a less CPU heavy version, then switch to the best possible sound once you wind your latency back up to mixing levels.

You can also get some headroom for live playing by turning off the reverbs on other tracks. And check your DAW features. Some of them can turn off all effects on tracks that are muted, which helps.

But a very basic modern computer completely blows away anything from ten years ago. If using computers to make music seems like where you’re heading, upgrading the computer is going to give you the best bang for the buck.

@zuki…

I completely agree about how crippled a 61 note arranger is if you use it for ‘normal’ playing and turn off the arranger. I don’t think I have EVER used a 61, a 76 being the minimum that can do regular playing as well as arranger use.

I think more of us need to think carefully about what we MIGHT want to do with a keyboard in the future before we settle for what really only works best with how we currently play. I have always split my playing between solo work and bands, and it always struck me as silly to have to have two keyboards to cover both scenarios when a 76 does it all. But that’s just me. Some don’t like the extra size and weight of a 76, but I feel they future proof you in case you want to grow…

And, of course, my 20 lbs BK9 easily allows me to stay on the 76 and still have a keyboard lighter than many 61’s! Win/win! 🎹

Zuki, well, that is certainly clever, while trying new keyboards making extra bucks, I didn't think of it :-) quite a journey you are having :-)

Diki, thank you for these tips. I will see if my interest in VSTi will last... There is indeed this "track mixdown" option, it also can be called "freeze", but this thing always irritated me as you never really know if any track is actually done. It makes the process linear, while creativity should be more free. My computer handles a decent number of tracks; it's just not ready to work as piano; but I'm taking a break from piano as well; although with PSR-S670 I probably just have a half of piano, but that's better than nothing :-)

The thing about freeze is you don’t erase the original MIDI tracks (just keep them muted and the VSTi turned off), so if you want to go back and change something just make a new mixdown without the track you want to work on…

Only takes a minute or so, a lot cheaper than a new computer!

Which piano VSTi is giving you fits? You might want to check if you are tracking while more than one mic position is on (every extra mic tree doubles polyphony needs) and maybe back off on the sympathetic resonance samples until you render. Then there’s the issue of mixing the room mics with the close ones. Some of the top libraries can chew up 240 voices for just fairly normal playing, especially if you are heavy on the sustain pedal!

It is true, Diki, but as I said, my computer handles a reasonable number of tracks, this is why I'm giving VSTi a chance. I don't plan to fix the problem with latency on this computer, which is noticeable when I play piano sounds, which means using all my fingers and a sustain pedal; I tried different libraries; I guess my computer isn't just fast enough, that was my initial point, that you can't expect to replace a hardware instrument with any computer and software. There are nuances. Hope one day I'll check it on a more powerful machine.

A lot of piano VSTi’s (and other things) will post minimum specs for acceptable latency (if you can hear it, it’s definitely too much!). Does your computer match their minimum specs? If it does, maybe the interface is a suspect (and low latency drivers if installed)..?

Thing is, you’re looking at at least $1000 for anything hardware that gives even a very inexpensive (or even free!) piano VSTi a decent match. To match the results from a $300-500 VSTi, you’re looking at a $2000-3000 stage piano. A decent interface and a very powerful computer/laptop gives you that incredibly realistic piano sound for a lot less than those TOTL Stage pianos!

But that computer/interface gets you amazing drums, synths, guitars, basses, brass or anything as well. It’s what I’d go for in your position.

I think it's almost there, "almost" being the operative word here.. But the thing is that a lot of music today is created not so much by playing but rather by editing. And that used to stop me from trying, I preferred to play my arranger coming up with songs. It didn't feel right to work with music without actually playing it. But I see that today's composers, who actually make their living by writing music, mostly work with VSTi. I know that you can actually play the VSTi; what I mean, it's still more work with MIDI data, adding and fixing automations, etc. Since SX900 didn't solve all my problems and is actually away right now, I abandon all my believes and follow the principle "do what you can where you are with what you have" :-)

Since you have your VSTi up and running, I want to ask, what do you spend more time playing: your BK9 or your software instruments?

My software instruments are simply sounds I play from my BK9. I treat them as functionally identical. I make a distinction between VSTi’s that are primarily sound sources, and groovebox software, which is primarily a way of triggering loops and beats and sounds. It’s not a compositional workflow I enjoy. If it didn’t come from my fingers, I don’t consider that I wrote it!

I freely match sounds that come from the BK with VSTi’s, but sometimes in the early stages of working on something I’ll use the BK to flesh out the rough, then gradually change them over to better VSTi sounds.

I’m not really into any music that demands the groovebox approach. I like to play!

Well, by editing midi data I don't mean working with fragments created by a 3d party. I illustrated what I mean in the video I posted earlier. It is when a music keyboard is used to come up with a melody, to try out sounds and to record some phrases, but then all the notes are edited, other notes are drawn with a mouse, some automations are added, drum loops can be also created from scratch. Even vocals in modern music can be tuned and quantized. I'm not saying that it is better, in fact I think it can be a reason why we have so many meaningless songs nowadays; with all this developed processing it's easier to hide the lack of idea in the first place, and software synths and libraries sound so good that it is easier to impress a casual listener. But it's hard to fight progress.

I see that you sort of expand your keyboard with a computer, which helps it to stay relevant. I had an impression that you also got another keyboards, was I wrong? SX900?

No, still gigging with the BK-9, but back at the house still making do with older gear other than the VSTi’s. Kurzweil K2500S (still a very amazing sounding keyboard despite its age!), Korg Triton (again, bit of a classic!),

Only thing bought recently (the cancer treatment pretty much chewing up most of my discretionary spending!) has been the SWAM software horns and strings.

But this works for me, as I’m pretty old school in my tastes. Not really interested in sounding contemporary, I’m a bit too old to go chasing trends! The goal with my sounds is not to impress, but to have them be indistinguishable from the real thing, to the point it’s not even noticeable. There aren’t a lot of acoustic sounds in most arrangers that can do that, IMHO

And I definitely don’t use the ‘blocks’ approach, the music of my era is too complex (mostly!) to be able to do with repeated chunks of anything! I am pretty dismayed with how relentlessly diatonic and simplified most pop has become. Even the Beatles start to sound like Tchaikovsky compared to today’s four chord kiddy songs!

Bottom line, I’m not writing much, always been more of a session player for other people’s music. And there is where getting your sounds nailed is mostly appreciated. Nothing worse than having a great part pushed back a bit in the mix because by the time it’s brought to the forefront, you can hear it’s fake!

Keep on being you… just try to get the tools that achieve it best. Nothing stifles creativity more than having to slow down your flow to accommodate older gear!