Hi All,
After demoing both the Kronos61 and the MoXF6, I returned them both and am now a proud owner of a BStock PC361 that I picked up at the local GC for the (I think) amazing price of $399...I couldn't believe my eyes. It has a couple scuffs on the front from moving from rack to rack but other than that this thing is PERFECT for my needs and since I got such a good deal I didn't hesitate to order Kore64 from Sweetwater.. Now I've got one hell of a machine for more than half the price of the Kronos. And surprisingly (based on what I've read from internet reviews) I'm finding the Kurz interface itself to be very intuitive...much more so than the huge screen on the Kronos filled with too much tiny information or the mass amount of buttons and functions on the MoXF. Because this design makes sense to me, I feel I'm making 100x more progress in learning how to do what I want to do with this machine.
While I'm no noob to piano, and I understand the basics of Midi, I've never really used keyboards/midi extensively for creating music...My main instrument is guitar and vocals with piano and bass a close second. Previous to this I used a Studiologic 88 key controller with Acoustik Piano and that was about the extent of my keyboard/midi usage in creative situations.
With a baby on the way I have a feeling my band time is going to be quite limited so in the interest of keeping the songwriting fresh, I wanted to get a keyboard workstation to give me the full band when I don't have the luxury of being with one.
Along with the keyboard, I also purchased an Akai MPD32 for pads.
So that's my story....here are some questions that I've come up with so far that I'm hoping you guys could help me with. Most of these are probably more MIDI questions but since they relate to the Kurz I'm asking them here.
1) Drum maps in PC3. I don't get it. Sometimes they match up to the program, sometimes they don't. If they're not going to be the same for pretty much all of them (I get that the ALL KICKS, etc would be different), what's the point?
1b) Even assuming that the map was consistent across programs, why are there multiple kick 1s or snare 2s when they actually have different sounds to my ear? I could see if it there were 3 kick 1s across the keyboard and they were all the same or if there were kick 1-5 spread across and they were all different but as it stands I don't understand what it means.
2) The Kore 64 kits seem to have completely different drum maps yet there is no separate drum map provided with the documentation. What am I missing?
3) When does it seem like there's very conflicting information about midi note numbers vs actual note with octave? Seems that the Kurz drum map note names don't match up with what Sonar wants to call those notes for the same note number.
4) Short of having the program or setup sheet printed out and sitting next to you, outside of the first two banks how do you know where to find the area in the programs where a certain category of instruments are?
That's all for now...I really appreciate the help.
Drum mapping in the PC3 is a little complicated, but I'll try to cover things here.
Firstly, at the keymap level, you can assign any sound to any key. You have full flexibility on how to do this, but for existing drum maps it's a lot of effort to change them. In the K2000 days, Kurzweil had some specific drum maps they used, which weren't General MIDI, or any other commonly used drum map.
For backwards compatibility they maintained support for those.
When the PC3 arrived, Kurzweil recognized that people tend to use GM mapping due to the wide support for it, and included the drum remap function (On Program -> Edit -> Output page - and Master Mode) to translate from the various drum maps used on the PC3 to the GM standard, so once they are enabled, the PC3 remaps GM inputs to play the correct note on the PC3.
That's the easy way to consolidate all the PC3's various drum maps so that they play to the GM mapping.
The Puppeteer
ah yes...i remember reading about the GM remapping but completely forgot about it in practice. I'll check that out as I think that will be easiest.
What about the multiple kicks/snares/etc? The main thing I'm wondering is if I'm mapping the akai to the kurz, and I want all sounds available to me (but don't need repeats) do I need to map a pad to each kick or just one each of the kick 1, kick 2, kick 3, etc?
It depends very much on the particular drum program that is being used.
I don't tend to use the Kurzweil preset drum programs, instead I make my own and assign 1 key per sound, and I only assign what I need. In the defaults they may have a sound over a range of keys, sometimes the tuning changes, sometimes it doesn't, or sometimes it might be a DSP or Effects parameter that changes, or they might be assigned to adjacent keys to allow for faster playing, or just to fill in the gaps. If the sounds are truly the same, just assign one of each to the akai.
The Puppeteer
