Seems to have been a long long time since I've seen anything from Alec - hope your'e still there and working on the "extended Manual" for the 7000. In the meantime, to coax you back out in the open I've got a query which has been puzzling me for some time and it goes like this.
While I can accept the concept of recording and playing back variable sound, i.e music, from a moving object such as a vinyl or cd disk, magnetic wire (gosh that's old hat) or magnetic tape I just can't get my head around the idea of recording and playback from an inanimate object, for instance, press the demo button on my 7000 and get incredibly realistic playback of music.
Reminds me a bit of when I was being trained as a Wireless Operator/mechanic in the RAF many many moons ago when we were told that electricity always flowed from positive to negative. A few weeks later we were told that in in certain circumstances (I think in the case of thermionic valves) it flowed from negative to positive, and that I couldn't accept - just like being told that in some instances water could flow up hill.

Anyhow, can Alec (or anyone) explain how music can be stored and played back from this "inanimate object?"

Ogre

Hi Ogre,

Like you, I have the feeling that Alec is a very busy guy right now, probably because he is writing a "How Do I Do That?" manual for the KN7000. And I suspect the holidays may have interrupted his work to some degree. He has been just super helping all of us to understand and operate our keyboards better and in the absence of any "good bye" from him, I expect him to be back soon.

I am going to take a stab at answering your question about solid state memories. I spent the bulk of my working life in electronics. While I am clearly "dated" in terms of my knowledge and experience, the fundamental principles remain pretty static. Memories are nothing more than storage areas consisting of thousands, millions, and in some cases billions of memory locations. Memory locations can be accessed by computer programs which themselves are written into memory.

In the old days of tapes, we passed a tape across a head which read the magnetized particles on the tape. The electronics inside the cassette recorder (for instance) received this information from the head, processed it, and intelligent music or speech or whatever came out of your speakers. The point here is that the head was reading the information on the tape in a sequence i.e., in simple terms - signal one, signal two and so on until the end of the tape was reached. The tape was the storage medium or "memory", if you will.

The same process can be achieved digitally. A program can be written to extract information from each individual memory location sequentially i.e., memory location one, memory location two and so on. When you play your keyboard and save the song, you are storing Bits and Bytes in memory locations that represent in digital form the sounds you played. Your sounds went into memory in a sequence over time (note after note if you will) so if our program extracts that note information from memory in the same sequence in which you played the notes, and processes the information through the electronics and eventually to your speakers, you will hear a faithful reproduction of your song.

When you push the Demo button on your keyboard, it sets in motion a computer program which interacts with memory locations, extracting sequentially what was recorded, processing the information through the keyboard electronics, which in turn feeds the results to the speakers and, voila! - music plays.

Now, after all of that, I hope I have not steered you in the wrong direction. I could go into more detail but I don't think getting more technical would be helpful to your understanding of the process. Perhaps some others would like to share their thoughts on this subject. I just wanted to keep it simple for the sake of clarity and understanding.

Hope I have helped to answer your question, Ogre. Take care.

Regards, Chuck

With the holidays and "How to Book" and columns for the Technote Magazine I am sure he is plenty busy. Not knowing personaly other members of the Forum, and being retired I sometimes forget that some have to work to put bread on the table and of course buy Keyboards.

Hopefully it is not a problem with health. I am sure that Graham T or another person closer to Alec would keep us posted.

Would be good to hear from our Garu (not to sure of that spelling).

Fran still in Florida

Hi Chuck,

As you know, Willum has also replied on this topic, and many thanks to you too for your reply.

All this goes to prove what a great forum this is with so many folk willing to help out. The way things are going I may be able to do the same before too long but first must go and open a tin of sardines..

Hey Fran,
The word you want is guru, and that's after eating just one sardine .

Best wishes, Peter