Kronos nylon

[dangerousdave]

You know I spent about an hour reworking one of the Kronos STR-1 patches and came up with this Nylon String Gtr ... Kronos Nylon String Gtr (STR-1)...

Nice!

[MidnightPackage]

Really lovely burningbusch! Thank you for sharing.

[songbird]

Thanks for sharing burningbusch.
Is that a preset patch or edited?

[Timo]

but if you listen to http://www.youtube.com/user/GospelMusic ... PVVu0rgRKY at 4.12 you will hear an example of what the OP was saying.

That recorded audio has been seriously, seriously compressed. Not a fair benchmark.

[ddavilyx]

aron, check your ears. It's not the sounds. Every single gig that i play at... I sometimes use the guitar sounds on the xs. People start looking around to try and find the guitar player. They simply can't find him. Minutes later, the song has already ended. It is then, that they notice.... they were tricked. Then they ask me the coolest question. How did you do that? Then they also say, I didn't even know that you were playing that. It sounds so real.

Also, when ever I play the guitars, or flutes, or saxes, people are able to say what the exact instrument is. But when you play the acoustic guitars on the Kronos, people are trying to guess what it is because it almost sounds like a bell, a EP, or some other synth fx. LOL. You are funny bro. Just admit it.

[ddavilyx]

BergerS, thank you. I knew someone would agree with me here. Trust me bro, if you got ears to hear the quality of what YAMAHA puts out, then you might be a little disappointed by the acoustic guitars in Kronos. When I buy a keyboard, I want all the sounds to be useful and not have to use a real instrument to substitute because the sound engineers couldn't do it right.

[ddavilyx]

burningbusch, the lower end sounds descent but when you start going up higher, it starts to sound like an EP. Can't you tell? And that's not really how you play a nylon guitar. You gotta study the inversions and articulations of a guitar a little more. You are playing it like a piano.

[worth]

The lower end is never the problem. Its the mids to higher end that tells to how good a nylon string emulation is. Unfortunatley that Kronos guitar Burningbusch produced starts to sound like a harp the higher up the register he plays and less like a guitar. Like i said before its only one sound so its not a mega issue but folks dont get so sucked into keyboard worship whether its a Kronos, Motif or Fantom that you lose your objectivity.

[rrricky rrrecordo]

You know I spent about an hour reworking one of the Kronos STR-1 patches and came up with this Nylon String Gtr. Unlike the Motif, which is only three velocity layers which jump abruptly one to the next, the Kronos is completely linear so it plays like an instrument with a wonderful dynamic range. You can change the timbre of each string plus dozens of other meaningful parameters. I love the warm, organic quality of the sound.

Kronos Nylon String Gtr (STR-1)

Busch.

Expressive, perhaps. Convincing nylon string guitar emulation... not so much.

Flamenco harp, maybe, and a nicely played one at that!

[BergerS]

To my ears it sounds just like how Korg describes their STR engine, they say its like having wire string which you can edit its attributes.

Guess what? that's how it sounds to me! a wire string with dynamic and the strumming effect, but that's it! I don't hear the sound of the wood.

Maybe for this sort of sounds, sampling is a better solution with catching the quality of the sound, or maybe a combination of both.

Again, Yamaha and Roland done it quite convincingly.

I think Korg has made excellent job with Kronos, I just hope they will address it as what it is, a perfect workstation platform which already includes lots of marvelous sounds, and now that it started to sell and fulfill its ability to get the cash flowing, lets improve some of its week points (guitars sounds, better sequencer and maybe easier to read interface ).

No instrument is perfect, but at least Kronos has the potential to be such, I just hope Korg will be able to unlish it.

[dangerousdave]

You know I spent about an hour reworking one of the Kronos STR-1 patches and came up with this Nylon String Gtr. Unlike the Motif, which is only three velocity layers which jump abruptly one to the next, the Kronos is completely linear so it plays like an instrument with a wonderful dynamic range. You can change the timbre of each string plus dozens of other meaningful parameters. I love the warm, organic quality of the sound.

Kronos Nylon String Gtr (STR-1)

Busch.

Expressive, perhaps. Convincing nylon string guitar emulation... not so much.

Flamenco harp, maybe, and a nicely played one at that!

Sounds pretty convincing to me, but I appreciate that I don't have the ear that some people do, and that I was expecting a nylon guitar. My wife's a guitarist, and I just let her hear Busch's piece without telling her what it's supposed to be. I asked her what instrument it sounds like, and she said, "Sounds like a nylon guitar".

[shap]

ddavilyx:

If you want warm violins for gigging, the XF and/or the KRONOS are as good as you're going to get. People will argue between these and Roland, but at this level it's as much taste as anything else. If you're willing to put a VSTi in the picture, you want to look at the EastWest sample libraries, which are in a completely different league. But of course, the EastWest product doesn't have "live performance" in it's design goals. It's intended to solve a completely different problem.

I had a Motif ES for years, I currently have an XF, and my Kronos is showing up any day now. I've been playing the floor models on the K since they arrived. Because I do a lot of orchestral stuff, I gave some attention to the violin family on the K. And because it's a particularly hard sound to do well, I also paid attention the the Sax family on the K. I need to spend some more time with them side-by-side in my studio to decide which I like better for these sounds. For my subjective tastes the K sounds did need some tweaking. Mind you, I couldn't have done the corresponding tweaks on the Motif.

But for anything where I can bring in a DAW it's just not a contest. A keyboard with perfect samples and/or perfect modeling will lose on that comparison for these instrument families. A keyboard just doesn't over the means to do the kinds of expressiveness and articulation that the instruments demand to be played well.

For violins:

If the question is "how good are XF and K, by the standards of keyboard synths", my answer in both cases is that they are pretty good. If what you want is a solution for gigging, they'll get you by pretty well.

If the question is "how do they compare to VSTIs", then I have to say that the EastWest sounds are so much better than either keyboard that it's kind of an apples and pebbles thing. The EW samples are better and larger, but more to the point articulation and expressiveness issues carry the day here. That cuts both ways, of course. You can get those articulations out of the EastWest samples, but that's because you get to fiddle them in the DAW. There's no way you can get them live.

I'm looking forward to having a V-Synth GT in the shop to see what it does in this part of the sound space. I'm curious how much value Roland's work on AP helps or doesn't help.

For Sax:

I like to listen to the sax because (a) I love the instrument, and (b) it's about the hardest thing to model that I know about. For Sax, I like both keyboards, but I'd personally give the nod to the XF when played from the keyboard. Once again keep in mind that I haven't done a side-by-side yet.

For orchestral, again, I'd go with EastWest.

For Jazz/Blues, I'd go with Mr. Sax T (and family), though there are one or two others worth checking. Once again, Mr. Sax T is way above any keyboard I know about, including these. In contrast to EastWest, Mr. Sax T also does an impressive job live.

But for Sax, the ability to use a breath controller makes an enormous difference. The XF can do that. I've seen some discussion here about breath controllers on Kronos, but I'm not entirely clear where that stands on the K. It's one of the first things I'm going to dig into when my unit shows up at home. Trying to have synth Sax without breath control is kinda like trying to have human sex without ... breath control ... ah, well, you get the idea.

A breath controller can do amazing things for violins as well.

But the qualifier that I haven't dug into breath control options on KRONOS yet is really important here.


I guess what I'm saying is that for both of these instrument families, it matters a whole lot what you are trying to accomplish to pick the right answer. If you expect a keyboard synth to do a world-class job on either of these families, well, you're dreaming. Just on the basis of the articulation and expressiveness challenges when working through a keyboard, the impediments are nearly overwhelming.

[shap]

All keyboard-based guitar patches sound fake.

Well, sure, but to paraphrase a similar exchange concerning Pianos...

Have you ever really tried to get a decent-quality synthesized acoustic guitar sound out of an actual guitar? I mean, just listen to them. There's all this "mechanical" noise in the way. I've been playing acoustic guitars for 35 years, and they're definitely getting closer, but they have a long way to go to match those synthetic guitar sounds on a modern synthesizer.

With modest encouragement, I could A/B some really nice guitars that I have lying around against the XF and the K for y'all. It hurts. It just... hurts.

[shap]

I dislike yammy sounds (except for acoustic guitars and motorbikes).

I hadn't found the motorbike patch on the XF yet...

[BergerS]

I dislike yammy sounds (except for acoustic guitars and motorbikes).

I hadn't found the motorbike patch on the XF yet...

Don't bother.... only Ducati keyboards makes these sounds properly