really, there's no need to buy too expensive keyboards

Or, get a notebook and put in it:

NI Xpress keyboard (all your FM, B4 and prophet sounds) - 99 USD
NI Absynth for your synth sounds - 339USD
A good piano (Kontakt version - lots of them out there) - Boesendorfer 290 for example: 199 USD
GPO (for all the orchestral sounds) 249 USD
Total S$1506.20

You'll get sounds better than any sound modules in the world; you don't have to carry heavy racks everywhere you go; you can surf the net and do you wordprocessing etc on the same notebook.
 
yeah.. i used to carry a small cheap module but i got a little annoyed with the limitations of the module/controller's midi implementation. i used to have a kurzweil me-1 which would hang if it received a program/bank cc it didn't recognise. gah.

yeah. the laptop idea sounds good. is there a way to hook up and play more than one controller at the same time thru the programs? e.g, a bosendorfer on one keyboard and a b4 on the other, and having both of them playing at the same time. so far i've only been able to play only one vsti at at time.
 
iansoh said:
is there a way to hook up and play more than one controller at the same time thru the programs? e.g, a bosendorfer on one keyboard and a b4 on the other, and having both of them playing at the same time. so far i've only been able to play only one vsti at at time.
Click to expand...

Can be done. Assign each of those to different midi channels. Oh, I forgot. GPO comes with a decent piano - so you don't need a separate piano. The cost of the live keyboardist notebook goes lower....

Forgot to add the many free plug-ins you can get - a number of analog sounds and synth sounds like this one:
http://www.greenoak.com/crystal/index.html
 
technology

looks like i have not catch up with technology
good to see you guys sharing info!!!

for myself i just bring a half rack module as a basic sound generator,
the other source of sound comes from the studio keyboards.
 
Cheez said:
Can be done. Assign each of those to different midi channels.
Click to expand...

really meh? i tried it on sonar3 before, it didn't work. cos when u click on the particular track window, only that track will be active right? can't activate the other tracks. so only the active track got sound, the other track with my other vsti on another channel just wouldn't play.

is this a limitation of sonar? what have you done on your setup to make it work?
 
Don't see why it shouldn't work. I don't use Sonar, but I guess the basic principle is the same. If each VSTi is assigned to a track and a different midi channel, your midi controller/ keyboard should be able to play each VSTi separately depending on which midi channel your keyboard is set to. Did you change the midi channel in your keyboard? Anyway, you don't need Sonar since each of those can be used as a standalone. Again, make sure each one is assigned to a different midi channel.
 
agreed that a laptop will help lower costs in the sense u don't need a tone generator and can update new patches anytime!

but what about those of us who doesn't have a laptop? plus, the sounds that are generated from a notebook is quite flimsy as compared to the awm in Yamaha keyboards.... maybe i'm just not cut out to be a midi musician :)
 
keyboard virtuoso

oh yah, I see you are a Jordan Rudess Dream Theater keyboard virtuoso
Maybe can just stick to using tone modules.
I always missed Kevin Moore Images and Words artistry.
 
Silencer said:
but what about those of us who doesn't have a laptop? plus, the sounds that are generated from a notebook is quite flimsy as compared to the awm in Yamaha keyboards.... maybe i'm just not cut out to be a midi musician :)
Click to expand...

The sounds are not generated from the build-in midi sounds - all soundcards build-in sounds are are terrible. The sounds are from the softsynths. And they are way better than most modules - plus more polyphony if you have a fast machine with lots of RAM. You can easily get about 400 notes polyphony from a fast machine nowadays.

Laptop cannot replace all hardware modules but I think it can emulate most of them pretty well. I sold all my hardware years ago when I decided to go down this track. I'm not going back to hardware any longer. Once you use them, you'll see how versatile and easy to use they are. You also have a huge LCD screen to work on, not a small 2x6cm screen. The only issue is the slight latency of a few ms of which one can get used to it after a while. But for a keyboardist who likes to use lots of sound modules and don't want to carry them around, I think this is a good way to go.

If you have doubt about the sound of these synths, see these sites:
NI
GPO
Spectrasonics

Having said that, I actually don't have these synths. I use GigaStudio.
 
WOW!

what an interesting link!
time to throw away all the hardware,
and let the software interface with the hardware!
 
Hmm. Looks like somebody's post got removed...

Anyway, the point is not that hardware modules are not longer usable. Far from it, they are also increasing in complexity. Otherwise the hardware manufacturers would have stopped making new products by now. Some of them are really hard to emulate using software. Take the Moog for example - the Arturia's Moog V softsynth although emulates quite well but it takes up really a lot of CPU power. Load up one Moog V and perhaps you can't load any more instruments. I believe there's still a place for hardware modules.

The point is that when we keyboardist travel and play, we are very particular about the sounds we have. So we bring our racks of modules wherever we go - which is really a hassle. Softsynths help solve this problem partially. There's still the limitation of CPU and RAM. Of course, I would rather have a few 4U racks of PC than multiple racks of modules.
 
Great to know another Giga user!

Gigastudio is a PC only program - basically a software sampler. In short, it streams samples off your hard-drive - so you get to load in GB worth of samples instead of MB. No longer do we need looped samples - our samples decay naturally. Piano samples resonates - even pedalling and re-pedalling gives you different resonances. Each note of an instrument is sampled chromatically. You get for eg piano sounds with 30-40 samples per note and 16 samples per note for drums. You also get real legato etc. In short, the most reaslistic sampler out there. Halion and Kontakt does not even come close in terms of performance and polyphony. Comparing the latest versions of Kontakt and Gigastudio, tests shown that on a same machine Kontakt gives a max of 200-300 notes polyphony while Gigastudio 3 gives 400-500 notes with much lower latency plus real time zero-latency reverb impulse and also loads more instruments.
 
Can be integrated with Mac too with an interface

Hi,

Yes, with this, we need not worry about the quality of our acoustic piano, Bamboo flute or ERhu samples in our keyboard . We may not need an AKAI Z8 too :lol:

Instead, invest in a dedicated PC for gigastudio at 1/4th of the cost of the Z8.

Runs on inexpensive PC hardware, but integrates with Mac sequencers with a soundcard and a MIDI jack.
 
As far as hardware samplers are concerned, they are a thing of the past. Nobody in his right mind will go for a hardware sampler from Akai or Emu. One Giga PC can take on several Z8s with a fraction of the sample loading time.
 
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