OK... I'm a bass player/sound engineer who took piano lessons when I was young, and have decided to get back into keys for songwriting purposes, so I bought the Kross 2 as my first workstation. I'm loving the presets, have worked through the video manual on YouTube, and am in the process of following the sage advice to RTFM (which constitutes over 1000 PDF pages between them ).
So, being new to the whole MIDI world and all some of this is tough to digest, and I know it's going to take a while before I can get truly proficient at using all the features of this board. That being said, any of you veterans out there have any advice to someone who is just getting started in all this? I'm so green I'm really not sure what questions I need to ask at this point. Any links to good resources; books, websites, etc. would be greatly appreciated. I've tried looking up a few myself, but they all seem to be speaking a dialect of English that I'm not quite familiar with.
First: welcome to the exciting new world! As a former keyboard player, and current musician and sound engineer, you're very well placed to do well in this field.
My first advice:
Make sure that you're very comfortable with the distinction between program (single sound) mode, combi (several sounds) mode, and sequencer (songwriting) mode.
If you're just looking for a new piano, program mode is your friend. If you want a backing band (although less sophisticated than an arranger would provide), you want combi mode.
If you want to write a complete piece of music, then you want sequencer mode.
OK, having said that, here's the key thing that you need to wrap your head around: in the Kross you have sixteen channels, each of which can contain a virtual instrument. This applies to both combi and sequencer mode (which is why you can start recording a combi into a sequence). The sequencer is just like a numeric way of writing your sheet music, so that when you play a recorded sequence, the Kross is basically acting equivalent to a player piano.
Assuming you have that mastered, you should also be able to get the idea that the Kross can also record things like modulation wheel movements.
I'll leave that there to make sure you're up to speed so far. There's so much more that it can do! But one step at a time, right?
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