Kronos Interview: Korg's Rich Formidoni and Dan Phillips

Rosen Sound · Post by **Rosen Sound** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 9:58 am

I'm sure this is how we all feel

Akos Janca · Post by **Akos Janca** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 10:05 am

Back to the topic: thank you for posting the informative article.

Anybody noticed the details of the 9 small logos representing the synth engines? They are very nice!

X-Trade · Post by **X-Trade** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 10:27 am

DP: Support for release velocity is new; the keyboard transmits it via MIDI

I like this! Now all we need is polyphonic aftertouch

peter_schwartz · Post by **peter_schwartz** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 12:04 pm

FWIW, the Kronos responds to Poly AT.

mrk · Post by **mrk** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 1:57 pm

Sina172 wrote:HD-1 is insanely more powerful, because of the SSD

What has the SSD to do with the power of HD-1? Ok I need less RAM and/or have faster loading times. But voice X on OASYS sounds exactly the same as on Kronos. So no change there in 6 years..

@marketing strategy as discussed as above:
I know many music gear quite in depth, but (because of price tag and availability) I had _no_ idea what an OASYS can do (always thought it was also 'just a rompler').

So the first videos of Kronos did impress me very much as I thought 'Wow! Not only did they choose a better sample playback engine than on M3, but also invented so many new specific engines like STR-1 a.s.o!"

As soon as I heard that OASYS more or less already has those since years, I recalibrated my opinion to "ok, so it's already many years old and did not generate too much noise on the market. So STR-1 will probably not make guitars sounding more realistic than any PC3X or Motif XS."

Therefore I would agree that the marketing strategy is indeed kind of misleading, as at the first glance you think you are looking at a totally new instrument, whereas the changes compared to OASYS are in a scale of Motif XS to XF (around 80% the same).

Of course, the original machines were already beasts, but it's the comparison that measures improvement. That does not make Kronos a worse instrument, but the 'hype factor' generated by 'this is all totally new' is a complete different one.

GregC · Post by **GregC** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 2:03 pm

robbinhood wrote:I'm sure this is how we all feel

Shakil · Post by **Shakil** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 4:22 pm

I like the addition of Release Velocity support ..... the only other keyboard I had with Release Velocity was Alesis Fusion.... it makes the playing a lot more dynamic and expressive.

SynthME wrote:Has anything changed with the number and or functionality of the modulation routings?

DP: Support for release velocity is new; the keyboard transmits it via MIDI, and it’s integrated into both the EP-1 and SGX-1 for subtle control of mechanical key-off noises. The SGX-1 also supports sustain pedal velocity, for controlling the damper pedal noise. Pedal velocity requires that you use a half-damper pedal, which generates a continuous value instead of being just an on/off switch.

The number of available modulation routings is pretty impressive. I just counted over 270 in the MOD-7, for instance, all of which can be active simultaneously - plus the 8 “AMS Mixers,” which let you process modulation signals in various ways (smoothing, quantizing, reshaping, multiplying etc.).

burningbusch · Post by **burningbusch** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 1:58 am

mrk wrote:
Sina172 wrote:HD-1 is insanely more powerful, because of the SSD
What has the SSD to do with the power of HD-1? Ok I need less RAM and/or have faster loading times. But voice X on OASYS sounds exactly the same as on Kronos. So no change there in 6 years..

No the SSD does increase the power of the sampler exponentially. A 4+GB piano is not possible on the OASYS or any other workstation or DP. Instant access to 12+GBs of sounds is also not possible. The Kronos supports eight velocity layers per oscillator vs. four on the OASYS, so the eight velocity layer piano + pedal down resonance would not be possible on the OASYS. The SSD opens the door for much highly quality sample-based instruments that are not compromised in order to fit in X amount of RAM as they are on other hardware instruments. Streaming from SSD is a VERY big deal. I've been using computer-based streaming products for over ten years and it pains me to have to use the heavily compromised sample-based instruments you find on most hardware.

mrk wrote:As soon as I heard that OASYS more or less already has those since years, I recalibrated my opinion to "ok, so it's already many years old and did not generate too much noise on the market. So STR-1 will probably not make guitars sounding more realistic than any PC3X or Motif XS."

First, the guitars on the Kurzweil are not benchmarks. The guitars and basses suffer from a problem that plagues many Kurzweil programs in that they sound OK for maybe 1 or 1 1/2 octaves but then sound horrible as they stretch a sample to cover too wide a range in the upper octave(s). In contrast, the Yamaha guitars and basses ARE very good and could easily be consider benchmark instruments. My take is the sampled Korg guitars/basses are clearly better than the Kurzweil but maybe not quite as good as the Yamahas.

If you think the STR-1 is just about trying to create realistic sounding guitars you're really missing the point. Pluck string synthesis is a fantastic method for creating a wide variety of highly playable sounds, some of which sound like traditional instruments but you can take it in many different directions. Fully programmable pluck string synthesis is actually hard to come by. AAS String Studio is OK but isn't nearly as complete as STR-1 and it is very audible in the results. I loved the pluck string modeling in the OASYSPCI board and STR-1 is FAR beyond that.

STR-1 is one of the main reasons I'm sold on the Kronos.

Busch.

GregC · Post by **GregC** » Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:29 pm

Blast from the past time

Here's a 6 year old thread.

Wish I could locate the Formadini/Phillips recording from way back.
Its been apparently wiped from the O/P host

Any Internet geniuses who have 6 year old cache ???

anyway, its fun to read the posts.

And after 6 years, some of us are still kicking it !

kronoSphere · Post by **kronoSphere** » Fri Feb 10, 2017 5:01 pm

the link does not exist : what goes on ? Any other link for this interview ????

GregC · Post by **GregC** » Fri Feb 10, 2017 5:05 pm

kronoSphere wrote:the link does not exist : what goes on ? Any other link for this interview ????

\

yah. I noticed too. I googled and could not find it elsewhere. We would think its in more than 1 spot on the Internet.

Problem could be lack of search terms. It would be cool if someone with better skillscan find it

tomto66 · Post by **tomto66** » Fri Feb 10, 2017 5:43 pm

archive.org is your friend:

[urlhttp://web.archive.org/web/20110406045026/http://synth.me/music-gear/interview-ri ... org-kronos[/url]

GregC · Post by **GregC** » Fri Feb 10, 2017 5:56 pm

tomto66 wrote:archive.org is your friend:

[urlhttp://web.archive.org/web/20110406045026/http://synth.me/music-gear/interview-ri ... org-kronos[/url]

awesome

you know your http

Derek Cook · Post by **Derek Cook** » Sat Feb 11, 2017 8:43 am

Great

I just reformatted the URL

Interview: Rich Formidoni and Dan Phillips Go Deep Into the Korg Kronos (on Wayback Machine)

Maybe a forum mod can put this as an edit on the OP as an additional link?

GregC · Post by **GregC** » Sat Feb 11, 2017 1:38 pm

Derek Cook wrote:Great

I just reformatted the URL

Interview: Rich Formidoni and Dan Phillips Go Deep Into the Korg Kronos (on Wayback Machine)

Maybe a forum mod can put this as an edit on the OP as an additional link?

that would be neater I suppose. And thanks for the reformat

I was thinking that most posters would recognize the O/p is from March 31 2011.

And likely go to the last topic page to see whats up, and why I necro'd

I think some of the old posts are interesting

Too much Kronos time on my hands