Korg Forums

[Gunnar]

For a song, I'll normally use somewhere between 30 and 60 audio tracks in the DAW and one midi track (for the drums).

There will be 2-4 different bass sounds, picked, finger, drive, soft-ish, depending on song.
There will be at least 4 guitar tracks for the main riffs (2x hard pan left, 2x hard pan right). And then there will be additional tracks for individual lead / clean parts.. and perhaps another set of dual or quad takes for a different type of drive.
For vocals (though I'm not a great singer by any means), I'll use at least 4, perhaps up to 10 tracks. Main vocal, doubling of main vocal, accents and backing vocals.
And then there are the synth tracks... I use a separate track for each synth track, and there are usually 20+ of those. Pianos, strings, brass, organ, leads, squelshes, etc

They are not all playing at the same time, of course, but they each may require separate EQ and perhaps separate compression and will therefore warrant a separate track with separate settings. Then there will be effect busses for Reverb and perhaps a few different types of delay.

So having more audio tracks would definitely be a plus

The thing is though, that there are a lot of other bits that would need to be there also:

- Post-effect per track slider. This one is quite different from how the audio routing is done in the Kronos and is not an easy thing. When you have effects that depend on input volume (like compression) or that change the output volume (like an amp simulator), you want to control the signal going into that effect and you want the slider to affect the final result of that effect chain, so that you can adjust it in the mix. On the Kronos, you only control the pre-FX volume, which is somewhat hard.

- Composition.. While recording, you loop X number of bars and record it, say, 4 times. Then when you've completed, you have all those 4 takes and you can slice and pick the best sections from each of those, composing a "perfect take". Many call this cheating, but I like to think of it as a method for saving time. To some extent you have this with step recording and midi edits, but for audio this one is not present.

- Piano roll or visual editor for note input has been mentioned plenty of times in many threads I program my drums by hand, and some visual editor is needed. I tried to use the event editor and that was somewhat painful. Back in the day on my Korg X3 I programmed drums using the step sequencer, but visual editor is so much easier, I think.

- Visual editing of automation. Especially for vocals, you might want to raise/lower volumes here and there to bring out a word, reduce a lower a consonant, do some manual de-essing, etc.. So you want to look at the rendered audio and look for peaks and valleys and SSS patterns and select those and adjust volume. Some times pre-FX, some times post-FX. Technically, it would be possible to do this on the Kronos by riding sliders and control parameters, but again we're back to looking at an event list or doing it in realtime, which is time consuming and harder.

- Volume control on effect busses. The Kronos has effect busses, that is effectively what it has, and for sound design I love it. When mixing, I would have preferred to have the volume of effect busses next to my other tracks, so that I can adjust, say, the overall reverb while fitting the other tracks in the mix. Currently, you have control over the effect level in the effect itself or under MFX/TFX, so it is a few pages away and it is a parameter on the touch screen, not a slider at that point.

- Visuals... Many have asked for a bigger screen, and I do agree here too. Being able to see which tracks are active at any given time, what kind of volumes on the audio, visualization of automation, etc.. All that stuff. I'm guessing that a larger screen would require a dedicated GPU though, as the Atom's built-in GPU is probably at its limit supporting the built-in display. Expand that to HD or uHD and we'll need a much beefier piece of hardware to drive the graphics, or settle for very-very low frame rates.

- Input. While the Kronos control surface is great, clicking on the touch screen is less awesome For a good workflow, I would like to have mouse, keyboard AND the control surface at my disposal (on a big screen)

- VST / VSTi. Many have their favorite software instruments and software plugins that they want to use in their music. I tend to prefer built-in VST effects for EQ/Compression/Reverb on the DAW and use the Kronos or occationally my MicroBrute for synth sounds, so VSTis are not for me, but still, I do think many will want these in addition to what the Kronos has to offer.

I do like that the Kronos has a sequencer, and I do use it to quickly try out ideas and store them for later. And I'm impressed with what others use it for. At the same time, I also think it is unrealistic to expect Korg to take on the full DAW market backed by PCs (and then there's also the huge range of third party VST/VSTi plugins out there). The gap is huge and it would be an insane investment from Korg's side and I don't see that paying off for them.

Sorry.. this turned out a bit longer than I planned :p
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Gear: Korg Kronos 2 73, Arturia Microbrute & MiniBrute 2, Moog Mother-32, Ibanez RG320DXFM Guitar, ESP Viper 254FM Bass, Blackstar HT-1
Software: Reaper, EZ Drummer
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/gunnarsletta

[leonh]

All good and how much you would expect to pay for that perfect workstations or how much Korg would charge?

[SDDP]

Re-open tech support phone line.

That for me would be a HUGE improvement. Even if they went the way of Avid and charge per call
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Owned M1
Now Own:
Triton Studio 76
Kronos 88X