Korg Forums

[QuiRobinez]

i'm using the pa4x for a few days now and i thought it was a good idea to share some of the first impressions i have of this keyboard.

Easy of use:
The pa4x was delivered with os 1.24. So i updated it to 2.01, which was a very simple process. The quick guide manual was very good, so in a few hours i could find my way around the multiple knobs, touch screen items and 'hidden' features like the 1 second push in some of the knobs to bring the hidden menus.

For everyday performances all buttons are laid out well, it's very easy to play your songs with an intro, variation, fill and ending.


Sounds:
The main sounds are very good. Although i think there are a lot of bread and butter sounds (which makes sense in a keyboard) and to few alternative sounds. It's obvious that the included sound library focusses on suplying the most used sounds in songs.

The keyboard sets where you can select up till three main upper and one lower sound is brilliant. Also the fact that your own my direct keyboard set can be accessed at any time is a fantastic feature.


Styles:
This is where the pa4x really shines, every style is inspiring with lot's of variations to jam over or to use to play your own songs or songwriting support. I use it to create backing tracks for my guitar at the moment, and it's very good for that.

One thing that i use a lot already is the chord sequence recorder, it's so easy to record a quick chord progression and let the pa4x do the standard work so that i can concentrate on the melody top lines.


Songs:
The songbook is a very good feature. Personally i find the supplied songs useless. It's just not my cup of tea. But the songbook can be easely changed to a personal one. I really like that it's so easy to mix up backing tracks (mp3), midi files and song styles.


Creatorbot:
i've tried this with a lot of different midi files. In general every midi file delivers 1 or 2 usefull variations. The intro and endings were wrong in almost any file conversion. Very often the intro was placed in the Ending 1 variation. It's easy to solve in the style editor by assigning the pattern from the ending 1 to the intro 1, but it's obivious that the creator bot makes odd decisions during the process. But if you want one or two variations in that style to play with then the automatic process works quite well.

But i wanted to create my own styles that behaves like the supplied styles on the pa4x. If you are using a DAW like cubase for instance, then it's extremely easy and a very quick process to do this. In that case the only thing you have to do is to assign the intro, variation 1-4, the four fills and 1 or 2 endings markers to the midi file. Then the import works really well for that song. If you want to make the style more generic then you have to create multiple chord variations for those markers (major and minor) but that's also really easy to do.

So in general, for home use without knowing that much about creating styles you can create a couple of variations with the creator bot, but don't expect a perfect replication of the midi file.
For more professional styles you can add markers to your midi file in a DAW of your choice, and then it's rather easy to create new very good styles to your pa4x.

To be honest i'm surprised that there are so few styles available for free (or sale) online for the pa4x, it's not that hard to make.

for instance i tried to create a style from the midi file of "Robbie Williams - Angels". I used the Marker feature in Cubase to create a complete style with intros, variations, fills and endings and imported that to a complete style. That worked really good. It was quite simple to do and if you spent a weekend to convert your favorite midi files to styles you have your pa4x filled with all kind of styles for your favorite songs.

I use the Pa4x mostly in full keyboard scan mode, with Inversion bass activated. This way i can play the songs like i play them on a piano and the styles follows exactly what i'm doing on the keys. Very powerful to use it this way.


Programming:
I've did a quick scan of the sound programming mode. It's a very nice not too complicated programming environment to create your own sounds. The included rom library is very good, once you dive in the available oscillators you will notice that there are a lot of sound sources that aren't used in the factory sounds. Especially the modern dance sounds are missing in the pa4x, but the samples to base your sounds on are available in the rom library, so it shouldn't be to hard to create a modern sound library with lots of dance sounds for instance.

The sample engine is something i really have to spent more time with, it looks like that you can do more with it then in the hd1 engine in the kronos. A promising module.


Conclusion:
I'm really impressed with the pa4x, i can easely add my own styles and sounds to it (i'm more into dance / trance / ambient sounds / styles). The supplied styles are fantastic and give lot's of room to create backing tracks or to use them for jamming purposes. The sound quality is really good, also the PaAs system sounds really good if you add this to the pa4x.


What were your first impressions of the Pa4x?

[kbrkr]

Great Review Qui!

Glad you got the Pa4x and also glad your enjoying it. It's pretty deep for an arranger keyboard, so there is lot's more exploring to do.

Love to see your Style making Tutorial!
_________________
Pa5x, Yamaha Genos, ForeScore