Nord User Forum

"Toy"? Really?



*sigh*

RedLeo wrote:... We are alas, too few. And Yamaha would have been crazy not to go where the money is.

True. On the other hand, the more $$ they make from these new markets, the more interesting 'serious' gear will be spawned from them! Stuff that guys in suits may not have allowed to get further than the design bench otherwise.
I wouldn't buy one, but if it gets a new generation hooked on synths it can only be good in the long run.

hahahaha nice captions )

They are definitely not toys, but they aren't true synths either. All the demos seem to point to something that you are more of a technician with than an actual player. It is about making sounds and not music necessarily. The mini-keys fit that perfectly for the audience they are trying to reach. They will be awesome for some people but I know they are just not for me.

I bought a Mininova a while back. It rarely if ever gets turned on. My NS2, electro and A1 are on all the time.

Well, they're not toys, but they're not quite serious synths/keyboards either. I'm not quite sure who Yamaha are aiming at. They're very well built apparently, but possibly too well built and too well specified for the casual and hobbyist market at an expensive price compared to similar stuff from Roland and others - but they don't have the necessary for serious work either. And why 128 note polyphony for a monotimbral instrument? Hands up anybody who needs 128 notes at once

Yamaha are obviously trying to cater for the live market as well by giving them DIN MIDI capability as well as USB MIDI so you can play them from another MIDI keyboard, but with their small size and fiddly MIDI adaptors, I don't see many takers. Too much hassle, and nothing you can't do with existing keyboards.

At the quoted price you're not going to buy them casually and sling them in your backpack for school or college, and "collecting the set" will be prohibitively expensive. $3000 plus for four? Yikes. You could get a decent workstation for that money. But they seem to sound pretty good, so who knows? That might trump everything.

neolithic wrote:the more $$ they make from these new markets, the more interesting 'serious' gear will be spawned from them! Stuff that guys in suits may not have allowed to get further than the design bench otherwise.

I wouldn't hold your breath. If the market's not there, new serious keyboards won't be produced. And as far as I can figure out, the Refaces are using old repackaged technology, so if they are successful (and I'm pretty sure they will be despite my reservations), there doesn't seem to be anything new to come from them that could power a new generation of more advanced products.

On a separate note, I had a rather gloomy premonition. I am wondering if the current existing generation of high-end workstation keyboards are the end of the line. Roland and Yamaha have done nothing but update their existing Motif and Fantom range for years now, and I'm guessing that they might not see any point in trying to rival or beat the Kronos. And for Korg, where next after the Kronos? This keyboard has years to run yet, and I suspect that by the time it is completely outdated, things will have changed so much that workstations may be completely irrelevant in the market. To everyone except actual working keyboardists of course

Just a thought.

I'm with RedLeo on this one, Neo. "The more $$ they make...the more interesting "serious" gear will be? These are corporations we're talking about here. They will happily build and sell garbage if they can make lots of money doing it and most of that money not going to go back into R&D. Yamaha's TX81Z had user-definable scales nearly 30 years ago. Korg's 1988 release of 707 listed at $595 and had aftertouch. As someone noted recently, Ensoniq was producing polyphonic AT in the 90s. Seemingly more than half of the keyboard playing public no longer knows what AT is. Hate to go on a rant here, but corporate capitalism has been dumbing down the market for years. For too many, the profit motive is the primary focus. Yes, money has to be made to keep things rolling, but when the furtherance of the art becomes a secondary consideration...we all suffer.

Bless,

Pablo

They might not be strictly toys, but mini keys are technically unplayable to me, so I cannot consider these to be serious instruments. As a consequence I find the price completely unrealistic. And to make things worse, the marketing was inappropriate to the products... showing a CS80 in the teasers to end with something like this... Maybe if they did just these as small midi modules with no keys at all the reaction would not have been as bad as you can read in so many places.

As far as the future is concerned, I think the signs have actually been there for quite a few years and we've tended to ignore them, fervently hoping for new high end keyboards that mostly just haven't come. I reckon the "laptop/tablet plus controller keyboards" combination is likely where the future lies for live work. That paradigm is already here and will be far more widely adopted once more people get comfortable with the idea and the old massive hardware keyboards fade out. The only real issue is with stability and reliability on stage, but that will surely be overcome in time. It makes sense as the power of sample libraries and software synths is already pretty staggering, and control systems like Mainstage and Cantabile are more than fit for even top end professional work. We're just going to have to wean ourselves off our beloved hardware monsters and bite the bullet. And as long as companies like Nord, Moog, Kurzweil and DSI are still around to sweeten the medicine, there's a lot to look forward to. Fewer big-ass flightcases to heave around for a start

I was momentarily interested by the organ version. Sadly, it is is PWM or AWM as Yamaha have it - that is samples. Still, I suppose it will support pitchbend so the "Do it again" solo might finally be possible to re-create. BTW, the "Japanese Transistor" organ is an Ace-Tone. The other 3 keyboards have appropriate generation methods, although many won't ever consider Virtual Analogue appropriate for the CS80. But sampled organs? They're handy to have when they're part of a Rompler, for occasional use, but shouldn't be used in a dedicated instrument IMHO. Then again, if it had been properly done, those silly mini-keys would still have sunk it.
I'm guessing that the Hammond drawbars are volume controls for layers of samples with appropriate pitch shifts for the harmonic, so you can divide the 128 note polyphony by 9 in that case?