Yamaha gunning for the Nord stage and beyond…
1 Like
I sometimes spend hours watching videos about these great beasts, but seriously, what can they do that a Zynthian along with an equal set of keys and knobs can’t?
Not a dang thing baby, not a dang thing, and you gotta pay thousands!
edit: They very frequently are quite impressively engineered though. At that price you generally get a very good keybed and such.
Edit 2: and I’m still getting myself a Hammond XK5 or else a real friggin B3 cause that is required here.
It’s interesting to see what features they are keen to implement.
Certainly they are very proud, and probably justifiably so, of their classical piano action heritage…
1 Like
Do you not like setBfree? I think it’s really good.
Now @jtode , to be fair - and for all the affection and appreciation that I sincerely feel for the wonderful Zynthian project - there is a significant design and engineering gap, between our beloved genius box and a full-fledged dedicated synthesiser, with a custom OS specifically built for a no-compromise set of hardware resources.
This is not to cast the lovely Zynth in a lesser light, of course 
1 Like
There is a gap in all elements which include price and size of (full-time paid) development team. You may get what you pay for.
I didn’t watch the video to the end but the intro tells us of the three (yes - count them, THREE) sound engines. We are so spoiled here in Zynthianland that hearing someone boast of three engines makes me laugh. Of course the user probably stuggles to use more than that and excessive choice can be quite a curse. How many hours are spent previewing sounds and then trying to find one of the first ones that you think you liked more but can’t quite remember what or where it was? But here we have dozens of engines with limitless configuration options. (Future versions will improve workflows to make this more clear to users.)
I like the idea of their analouge synth emulator and laughed again as they described how you can introduce those errors and flaws that we spent so much time trying to iron out of our analogue synths. That did highlight that the engines we have in Zynthian do have some limitations, for example Raffo isn’t as good as we would like.
I remember my kids showing me a cool audio tool that picks up electomagnetic radiation and another that causes aliaising and another that crushes the bit depth. These also made me chuckle. I spent most of my younger life trying to remove all of these effects - I should have just embraced them and sold them to the next generation! Now that we have been through the vinyl and compact cassette redescoveries, will minidisc and 16-bit CD be the next great sounding discoveries? I do hope so - I have a stash of minidiscs I could sell…
4 Likes
Although I very much agree with your overall point, I would quibble with the “custom OS” part of your statement - I am reasonably certain, from the way updates are distributed and applied, that Montage is running Linux, same as Zynthian, just in the case of Montage, locked down and inaccessible to the musician-user, unlike Zynthian. Ironic, innit?
1 Like
Are you referring to UX here?
I don’t doubt that there are things with more powerful CPUs, but again, at the same budget level you can have several zynthians for the price of, say, a Nord electro.
As to UX, I have yet to encounter a multi function keyboard instrument (or guitar pedal for that matter) that is not a nightmare to deal with at the interface level. Again, I’m sure there are counter examples I haven’t seen, but the more you put in there, the more weird things are gonna get without a standard GUI with mouse and keys.
There are times when they get it right, and usually it involves a computer. My boss GP10, for instance - utter hell to program with the pedal knobs, but also comes with a very good editing software that makes things much easier.
Zynthian has this via vnc for all the engines, more or less.
But more importantly, if you say you like the UI on the $6k machine better, I believe you, and if you say it sounds better, I think we should have a little Pepsi Challenge about that but I’m not gonna say you’re wrong without doing that.
But is it really 6x the price better, every time?
Nahhhhhh
1 Like
Sound wise, it’s fine, as are most B3 clones. It’s a bunch of pure tones generated by mechanical means, not hard to duplicate the sound, and as long as it’s got all the same built-in effects and controls available it will do the job.
Where things fall apart is with the key action on every single “keyboard controller” device.
A real B3, and most organs far as I know, trigger the sound with no velocity detection high up on the key travel. Every cheap usb controller needs you to reach the bottom before it sends the note. This murders the player’s ability to use a lot of light-figured rhythm techniques.
Example I can think of off top of my head, listen to some Steppenwolf, Born To Be Wild. Overdriven B3 is heavily featured in the song and during the solo/interlude section you can hear him doing some really fast and short hits, basically playing the thing like a bongo.
I have looked into it, and there’s no USB controllers out there with “organ mode”, they all rely on a key-to-the-bottom action. Once there you can get any velocity curve you want, how nice, but you can’t play a friggin organ on it.
My Roland VR-09 has a nice keybed with the proper action, and it also has a B3 system that sounds about as good as SetBFree so I just use that for organ, and the most likely scenario is that I buy another one of those, or possibly a VR-730 for the second, and those are my glorified “controllers”. They’re pretty affordable and actually very hackable with ctrlr, you can do a four-way key split with 7 different sounds layered/split. Not out of the box, the factory interface is pretty limited, but they left a lot of stuff under the hood that is accessible via midi but not implemented in the UI.
2 Likes
That is fascinating. Thanks for taking the time to describe this. I don’t think I would have thought of the organ action without someone pointing it out. Most MIDI keyboards are velocity sensitive and hence require some keyt travel to detect the velocity of the key press. This is usually done by two, spacially separated switch contacts being measured and the time between closures being used to detect note-on velocity. (You could use the time between switch contacts opening to detect note-off velocity but this is rarely done.) An organ action like you describe would want a single switch contact near the top of the travel. Maybe this is something that manufacturers could add (you should start a lobbying campain 
) but it would still depend on how close to the start of the key travel the first switch contact operates. I have seen keyboards that have the contacts both at the end of travel with hammer style operation of the second contact.
I tested some of my keyboards and most have first contact some way through the travel. The LaunchKey Mini 3 has the contact much closer to the start of travel but that could be due to the mini keys having less overall travel.
I wonder what a cheap keyboard with no velocity would be like? I just tried a Yamaha PSR-170 which seems to be non-velocity sensitive and it is triggering notes about halfway though its travel so that isn’t much use. You could possibly pick up something really cheap at charity or second hand dealers by testing the action and sound trigger - who know?
1 Like
Hammond organ key contacts… Theres’ 9 ( yes nine !) of them…
I imagine Palladium was a viable option before cataylitic converters became important.
2 Likes
I actually have a PSR-170 here that I’ve been trying to wrangle the keybed into a teensy, so I can implant a zynthian brain. It’s a straightforward diode array but I could not make the thing repond right, and I think it might be partly my hackneyed job of soldering the leads onto the board. Vague plans to have another go at it, once I’ve successfully implemented some other diode array. Possibly from scratch.
I’m not so sure that these devices on the market are all actually using two switches - if they were, it would not be that hard to integrate a mode where it simply triggers with fixed velocity off the top switch, and I don’t possibly see how I’m the first organ player to have this complaint, given that they made the VR series (praises be to our benefactor all these years, Sir Roland) and went to the trouble. There was one specific day, I was feeling rash and would have gone out and bought any controller that had that mode, and I downloaded the manuals for every such device I could find, to look at the velo curves.
I have a BSOD’d Axiom 49, which, that series was extremely impressive in many ways, it’s like a relic from the early days of air travel, when all tickets were ridiculously expensive and all flights were ridiculously luxurious. Encoders not pots on the knobs, aftertouch on the keys, 4 zones, they did not scrimp on a single thing, other than that 5-cent timing chip that makes it not turn on anymore lol
I tried to do the rc network fix from youtube, failed, and then I thought maybe since it’s dead anyways I should maybe try and find that first switch and maybe… but from what I can tell it’s measuring the force of impact on the aftertouch strip, rather than timing two switches.
I think a lot about doing a kickstarter, actually, but I feel like I need to build a prototype of the mechanism first, and have it be a bunch of us pooling our money to get a run made of my/a Free design, rather than hawking a product I “invented”. But it is on my to do list, to get the mechanism itself sorted out…
The B3 truly is a fascinating beast. It’s completely understandable how it remains iconic. I don’t even know what other product in any category you could compare it to…
A Mr K Emerson makes careful adjuxtments to his L100 during a recital . . . .
it didn’t end well…
3 Likes
It belongs in that wonderful musical concept the re purposed instrument.
Hohner and rhodes discovered similar niches and in the pursuit of that ever fascinating sound people pushed them into uses well beyond their original market.
The stories of the relationship between Mr Emerson and the hammond company grew in the telling, but the times were into snubbing authority, so in tweaking the nose of Bernstein and the like a new, far bigger, market was born.
When talking of key speed, one should also bear honourable mention to the other extreme. Whilst watching the tigger like excesses of the hammond the Eeyore of the prog rock scene, the mellotron.
Whilst the click of the hammond fired up the speed freaks the arrival of a mellotron chord appealed to a more leisurely crowd.
To curtail this whimsical trail, the keyboard itself is part of the performance and to believe all music nuance can be expressed throu’ one design of keyboard is folly The human animals will learn to use every available tool to satisfy their senses…
Take the RMI piano. A piano design of organ like dynamics. Used by Mr Banks to structure carpet crawler, a major seminal influence ( how much Enosification actually went on I wonder ) which led to something like Spring Song by Gryphon. Genuinely skilled classical musicians, contrasting harpsichords with mini moogs.
Perhaps clever mechanical contrivance with a hall effect sensors, fierce coils and magnets could generate the touch, but how would you deal with the tiny keys of a decent early harpsichord?
Perhap we will end up with the irony of the progressive future musician playing 6 differently structured keyboards with identical sound modules to compare with the 80’s synthesist who played the same keyboard with different synthesizer sound module.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
2 Likes
Indeed @riban , what I always thought was the most surprising part of the Zynthian project, as a whole, is that so much is being done by so few (Churchill citation intended) with so an intrinsically limited hardware platform, albeit very efficient in electronic design and performance balance.
I too find bizarre, if not outright misled, that the latest trend in sound design fashion concerns mimicking the artifacts and limitations of the previous generation of digital audio. Hence all the contemporary thriving armoury of bit-crushers, bit-reducers, artificial vinyl noise generators and wave folders based on forced sample aliasing.
about B3 clones the real reference is VB3 engine made by an Italian genius: Mr.Scognamiglio a.k.a. Ziokiller
he is the owner of GSI Soundware.: in my opinion the best plugin with virtual models of vintage instruments
You may find that they use two PCB track pads and two carbon conductors on the key to make contact.
I have an Axiom 61 which I bought second hand a few years ago but it lived with each of my kids through their university years so I never got to play with it. The key action doesn’t feel great on it. I bought it for the same reasons you list - the good feature set in the hope it would replace my aging Casio VZ-1 but I think the old Casio may have a nice keybed (although its key rest felt has disintegrated leaving just glue so the keys all stick and need some gentle fondling to get them to behave).
1 Like
I have only progressed to the point of noticing when a keybed doesn’t respond at the top, cause one of the first things I set about to learning was that fast stuff in Born To Be Wild. That, and reggae bubbling, I’ve got that down pretty good, and both need that organ response.
I have a collection of other devices and the only ones I can differentiate from the others are my digi piano (Korg B2, no relation lol) which I’m told is “spongey” and I think I understand what they mean but it works for me, and of course my DX7s which really does feel amazing.
edit: I will be taking a closer look at the Axiom, I have most written off reviving it as such but I can see all the leads from the diode matrices and the touch strip and whatnot, so it will be a fun retrofit project with one of the Teensy 4.1s I just got. If there are indeed two switches in there, watch this space. :>
I think the Axion has a spongy action.
I was in a band that was doing Thin Lizzy and Deep Purple covers and I wasn’t able to get the speed of Jon Lord’s Highway Star solo. What you say here helps me understand why. It wasn’t only my lack of vituosity but also the keyboard. (Bad workman and his tools… 
)
2 Likes