I would gladly give up EP-1 and CX-3 for granular/additive

[Gambler]

I would gladly give up EP-1 and CX-3 for granular and additive engines. I understand that they (EP-1 and CX-3) are very useful for people who do certain kind of music, but:
1. Tone-wheel organs and EPs are used in a rather limited set of music genres.
2. They are very limited in the palette of sounds they can produce.
3. I'm no expert in vintage electronics, but FM-based emulations of organs and EPs sound quite nice.

On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to do granular-like textures on Kronos. (Maybe I'm wrong. In that case I would appreciate an example.) And additive synthesis is just plain underused. I'm not going to buy Kawai K5000S, but it sounds very, very interesting.

...

Feel free to disagree, but please don't post some fake "feasibility analysis" about how "difficult" it is to implement granular and additive. I know that Kronos is not going to get those engines. I also know that adding a bunch of sine waves or looping a short sample is not that difficult and Kronos already does those things. The biggest problem is to create an intuitive interface for manipulating the parameters.

[GregC]

thats core keyboard stuff. why give it up ?

the next Kronos can have room for what you are interested in

[Jambo]

The CX-3 engine was the primary reason I chose to go with the Kronos! Been years since I hauled my Hammond around, I'd forgotten how much I missed it. I think at the end of the day, building a work station without the old school bread and butter emulations would seriously cripple sales.

[EvilDragon]

I'm not going to buy Kawai K5000S, but it sounds very, very interesting.

So don't. Get the rack, K5000R, like I did. It is splendid!

[SanderXpander]

I don't get the reasoning. Did Korg offer you a granular engine if you gave some others up?

[Bertotti]

No way no how would I give up my organs CX3 or sampled pipe or synth. Must have organs!

[Gambler]

I'm not going to buy Kawai K5000S, but it sounds very, very interesting.

So don't. Get the rack, K5000R, like I did. It is splendid!

I'm leaning more towards V-Synth (i.e. granular), but I have too many devices as it is. As far as additive, I'm thinking about just writing one.

I don't get the reasoning. Did Korg offer you a granular engine if you gave some others up?

Yes, they called me with the offer yesterday.

[LZ]

Technically, the CX-3 IS additive

But yes, I would like additive also.

[michelkeijzers]

Maybe Korg is already busy making more EXIs, whether additive, granulor or otherwise.

However, they will probably never remove an existing EXi, except when a new EXi will be an improved version.

Synthesizers are used by many people. I think the CX-3 is used by quite a lot of users, and some of those think it's a must (myself including).

Maybe the next Kronos has the EXis you want, so you can either wait (and be happy or not depending on the result), or find a synth (together with Kronos or not) to fit your needs now.

[carmol]

1. Tone-wheel organs and EPs are used in a rather limited set of music genres.
2. They are very limited in the palette of sounds they can produce.
3. I'm no expert in vintage electronics, but FM-based emulations of organs and EPs sound quite nice.

Hope you're joking

[Sharp]

A general comment, not related to the KRONOS.

Personally I'd welcome anything outside the normal. Organ, Electric Pianos and models of Analog synths are fine in all that and we do need them.

They are all typically normal though. Widely available in every flavour you can think of.

Granular is also not new, but it has the potential to produce the most creative new sounds you could ever imagine, **IF** you could actually program it. Granular tends to be not user friendly, or limited on some systems to make it easier.

Take Padshop Pro by Steinberg though, that seems to be a really great direction to take this. Seems to offer a clean UI, and from what I've heard, it's a very creative tool to work with.

I'd certainly pay for something like that inside my KRONOS.

Regards
Sharp.

[Bertotti]

Anything new in the Kronos would make me happy. I would even pay for new guts to give me more ram and great processing for more advanced synthesis. That said I would just be happy to add omnisphere to my computer for I believe I has granular. Maybe I am easily pleased.

[Gambler]

Technically, the CX-3 IS additive Smile

Maybe if we figured out how to add envelopes there...

It's possible do some "granular-like" synthesis on Kronos by using wavesequences and editing the loops inside multisamples.

You can also do rudimentary additive via MOD-7 by outputting all 12 oscillators (from two MOD-7s) in parallel, and mapping all envelopes to the AMP envelope. If you assign output level of each oscillator to hardware slider/knob, you even get a reasonable amount of control over timbre.

Neither are production-ready, but fun to play with on occasion.

Granular is also not new, but it has the potential to produce the most creative new sounds you could ever imagine, **IF** you could actually program it. Granular tends to be not user friendly, or limited on some systems to make it easier.

Conceptually, granular synthesis isn't that complicated, so I bet it's all about UI design. Or maybe certain tools try to do too many things at the same time.

Here is a video from the guy who created Monolake Granulator:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pn_b7OUO6I
I think it's pretty obvious what's going on in the tool, and he gets beautiful results with just a few tweaks to the UI.

[Zeroesque]

1. Tone-wheel organs and EPs are used in a rather limited set of music genres.
2. They are very limited in the palette of sounds they can produce.
3. I'm no expert in vintage electronics, but FM-based emulations of organs and EPs sound quite nice.

Hope you're joking

That pretty much sums up my opinion as well. All three of the OP's numbered points seem to imply a fairly narrow viewpoint, and I almost entirely disagree with them all.

About EPs and B3s:

1. If by "rather limited [...] genres" you mean the majority of popular western music from the last several decades, then yes, I would agree with you.

2. If by "very limited [...] palette" we're not talking about the dozens of styles and dozens of playing techniques that I can think of off the top of my head for either classic keyboard instrument, then yes, I would agree with you. Hit-one-note-and-it-goes-ding would essentially apply to every acoustic and electromechanical instrument ever devised.

3. If by "emulations [...] sound quite nice" you mean somewhat passable to the least sophisticated of listeners, then yes, I would agree with you. I don't think this is the target market for the Kronos.

All that said, I got a lot of use out of my K5000S years ago. It was my main synth (combined with a PC88) for a couple of years. I would gladly buy an engine like that for the Kronos (at around the same price as current Kronos sample libraries).

To the OP, why wouldn't you get a K5000? Maybe the Alchemy or Harmor soft synths? It seems unusual to me to be complaining about what's ostensibly missing from Kronos while not having actually owned examples of those synths.

[SanderXpander]

I get the desire for new interesting engines. That's a good discussion. Granular, additive, and more physical modeling options, as well as scripting or a more advanced HD-1 would all be great in my book. What I don't get is why one would have to make this point by saying they would give up already existing engines.