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I know someone out here has done this or even thought of ways to do this.

I know there are people out there that would want to have more than 2 Keyboard parts on the ESX and are thinking; "why can't we switch the the 2 time stretch parts and one slice part to be 3 more keyboard parts?"

I can not be the only one who is asking for a solution to this problem.

So I am asking again and have opened up the topic to include ESX Mods and Circuit Bending the ESX in hope to get an answer to this question along with other cool mod ideas. The magic question being:

Is there a software hack to make the 2 stretch parts and 1 slice part so that they can become keyboard parts? It would be nice to have 5 keyboard parts on the ESX...has anyone tried this?

I know one of you guys have made this happen...I can not imagine that there is not a single person who would want a way to have 5 keyboard parts instead of just 2.

There has to be a way...

Im afraid that is only possible to do using firmware hacking, which is very hard to do, and takes lot of time, and risky (could break your electribe).

It is very unlikely that the firmware has been programmed by Korg in such a way that this could be achieved by rerouting some pins on the PCB.

I know one of you guys have made this happen..

do you have proof to back up this statement? I would be interested.

Only hardware mod I know of are exchanging the tubes and this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A3Gy32ox38

The esx would be great with extra keyboard parts but i imagine the hassle is not worth it.
I use mine to trigger external synths via midi & when i wanted more mono keyboard parts i just bought an ea-1. Two becomes four straight away plus the ea-1 sounds to boot ! If i buy another tribe, i get two more & so on. Not only that but it's another external 16 step sequencer giving me further options.
I like it.

i use my keyboard parts to launch scenes and control cc in ableton live, if i have freed up space on the "keyboard" i will use a section to play pads. As long as its the electribe controlling and not being controlled you can control the pads in ableton polyphonically.

The only physical mod I've thought of is using up the free space inside the box (there is some in the EMX not sure about the ESX) and insert some kind of small FX board (most likely from a pedal) onto the main outputs (or maybe a dedicated fx on the additional outputs) but the big problem will be where to put the controls (knobs etc) and powering the FX board. it would be nice to finally have a decent on board reverb or maybe a compressor on the main outputs but finding a decent stereo comp that's small enough to fit in the box is unlikely.

Circuit bending and modding the circuitry of a DSP based box to modify the functionality of the parts would require a firmware hack as far as I know and that's well beyond the scope of most mere mortals.

There are so many products that are no longer being supported where it would be just wonderful if the manufacturer released the firmware to the open source community. Tenori On is the most obvious. EMU Command Station, ditto.
I'm with you on wishing the stretch parts were real parts but for what it's worth, I got tired of worrying about it and just got used to using the 1-7b parts and playing with the pitch knob. There are guides to match the number to a pitch somewhere. I bet Sauce published them.
-CCQ