Korg FISA SUPREMA
- Thread starter kep
- Start date
Thomas N
Well-known member
CPez
Member
Lost? At least from my career, I beg to differ Mellobob.Now, if we old guys could convince a few of the youngings that accordion is "cool" maybe that could change ... but, I'm afraid that battle has been fought already ... a number of times ... and lost
And the problem with Pietro's video, is that he didn't have much time with the accordion, so he used 99% Accordion sounds. I'm focusing, as you can see on the video I posted in the first hour of the release on the 3rd, Non-Accordion sounds. i don't understand Why so many people that are interested in electric accordions are so interested in it's accordion sounds. The whole point is to utilize the SYSTEM that is the Accordion to do everything the Acoustic Accordion Can't. To me the 7X was Way WAY good enough in terms of it's accordion sounds already. It's all about the non-accordion sounds.
CPez
Member
Also - The 8X Key Depth was 5-7mm, where as the Korg is 3.9-5.9, so much easier to glissando for instance.
And the reason I haven't put out a video since I did the First concert with the KORG in LA on the 4th, is because last week I went to record videos AT KORG's HQ and want them to come out with Official videos vs. me recording with my phone haha. They should be done editing in a day or 2.
And the reason I haven't put out a video since I did the First concert with the KORG in LA on the 4th, is because last week I went to record videos AT KORG's HQ and want them to come out with Official videos vs. me recording with my phone haha. They should be done editing in a day or 2.
Mockie
Active member
Roland has been cutting off models in the last few years... and then this! I do not understand...I wonder where those guys from DEXIBELL came from!
Last edited:
Mockie
Active member
Dexibell are an Italian company mainly making highRoland has been cutting off models in the last few years... and then this! I do not understand...
quality keyboards upto now.
Check their products on YouTube.
You echo my words exactly .................well we have exciting times ahead !!
I would just like to add in my small way, in my neck of the woods so to speak the people I play to want to be entertained like a wide range of music also like to sing and Dance and enjoy themselves .
Competition for gigs in this situation is not from another acoustic accordion player !! its from backing track singers , arranger keyboard
players who are not afraid to use all the bells and whistles , duo guitar players . etc ................
I have no axe to grind with whatever you prefer .........as we said in the 60's Do your own thing Man !!! be Happy Relax .........I know what I want and like . Peace and Love to you all
Just like to add a Quote from a top keyboard player ..HE SAID....."The most important thing "is not what instrument you play !!.........its "THE FACT THAT YOU PLAY"
Last edited:
Ventura
Been here for ages!
G makes a good and often overlooked point, which is to
have a clue what your competition actually is and how it affects things..
the Home Organ business was once, and for a long time,
bigger than the accordion business by far. Then it went into a
precipitous and fatal decline similar in it's speed to the implosion
of the accordion market and disappearance of the majority of
it's infrastructure (schools, retailers, manufacturers) almost overnight
as it were.
it was not from other Music related stores, or from Guitars and the Beatles,
it was simply because alternative "big ticket" items in the price point
emerged that engaged the public, and sucked away the discretionary spending
of a significant segment of the available (flush) buying public.
the killer of the home organ business was the advent of the personal computer,
and other similar things to spend money on that changed the lifestyle and goals
and desires of the consumer. Not other music related competition.
What is the competition for the $8000 accordion price point ?
well, what are the other things in the lives of mostly retired,
semi-wealthy males with varying degrees of musical ability
for their discretionary spending ?
Would they perhaps be distracted with a 3 month cruise around the world ?
would they prefer a new Corvette this year ? one could live like a
King in a Bordello in Thailand for half a year on $8000
when they look at getting their "value" from a purchase, will they
even expect to live long enough to enjoy a new long-term-investment
for a reasonable amount of time ?
What is the competition for the $8000 accordion price point ?
well, what are the other things in the lives of not-yet-retired
people who play high end accordions that can afford to buy another one ?
What is the competition for the $8000 accordion price point ?
well, what are the other things in the lives of people who Gig regularly
and will the new device make their lives and gigs easier ? more fun ?
$8000 dollars worth better ? do they also need a new PA system this year
and has their SUV been breaking down a lot lately ? Did their
oldest child have a crisis of health, did a brother land in jail again
and need a big bailout ?
usually, everyone has some mad-money threshold that allows them to
make emotional, spur-of-the-moment decisions and purchases of things
they may not have otherwise been thinking of buying, and of course as we
have seen that is a wide $$ range (among us in this forum)
For me, my feeling is, if i were bringing something to market, i would target
a price somewhere in the "middle" of that mad-money tier, so the idea
of someone taking a $2000 Italian built standard accordion and adding
musitunix stuff to it and then selling it for under $4000 seems pretty swift
to me and may have a chance for success
i would suggest Roland primarily drifted away from the accordion biz
because of attrition: losing far more numbers than it could
gain with younger students or other musicians who might
consider accordion as a second instrument.. and so the "numbers"
no longer support the high-end of the market, which is what supports
the R&D investment, hence the basic limited short-term decisions
and re-evaluations that have them merely satisfying projected sales
rather than trying to "drive" the market higher with new innovation/product
i would suggest that Proxima investors found out during it's
quiet, limited "test" roll-out in Europe that the numbers were not there
and now with Korg entering that limited space they will abandon
their project completely
by the end of the year, we should be getting some feedback in the music
trades data about the penetration of Korg's accordion into the retail
marketplace.. one can expect a surge at first then the key factor is
of course how quickly the "curve" falls and to what level of average
daily/weekly/monthly sales is sustained over the first 6 months
the numbers i would like to know are: how many units they have
confidently completed building/ boxing up for shipment to dealers prior
to "opening day" and i would like to know how many units
per-day/week they are capable of building should demand exceed
expectations
another mad-money point could be, if the prices of used Rolands
start to drop significantly will a lot of lower-tier $ people be able to
finally afford one ? up to now the low side seems to have been $1500
for the smaller ones, $2500 for the 7x series, at least occasionally,
while interestingly that Roland BK module seldom dips below $1000
and has held value much better than most music electronic devices
as always, time will tell
Thomas N
Well-known member
The same reason musicians drop $5K on the top of the line workstation from Korg, Nord, Roland and Yamaha and then post 100's of threads about which one has the best piano sound and the most piano-like feel to the keybed. Obviously these workstations can sound like anything in the world, with sampling, analog modeling and gigs of meticulously crafted sounds. But it always seems to come down to the piano sound (along with organ sounds being a close second).
Why? Because most of the professional musicians are pianists at first. They venture out into the world of synthesis and utilize many aspects of these workstations but in the end they'd like to sit down and have it feel like a real piano with the most realistic piano sounds. Some just purchase a stage piano (Nord Stage seems to be the leader here).
The beauty of a digital accordion, to me, is that you can get very close to the sounds of many different accordions, the bellows work like an acoustic accordion, the bass can really deliver with a nice acoustic string bass, and you can listen with headphones. The weight is a huge difference as well.
Luigi did a marvelous version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I mean it sounds great. But realistically? I'm not going to sit down and practice Raiders of the Lost Ark. I'm not going to put on a saxophone sound to practice jazz runs so I sound like Coltrane on the accordion.
Maybe I'm in the minority -and that's fine - but to me it's ALL about the accordion sounds since it's, well, an accordion.
As ever Ventura ....A brilliant report ......
Alan Sharkis
Well-known member
I’m just as enthusiastic about accordion sounds as non-accordion sounds when I play for myself, which is now. When my so-called band was together and we needed a clarinet sound, I could provide it. The only problem was that there is a visual incongruity from the audience’s point of view. A clarinet sound coming from an accordion? Huh?
As a male alto singer, I can attest to that. Visual incongruity leads to the audience not enjoying the performance as a whole but looking at details and being overtaxed with evaluating them sensibly. When I paired my singing+accordion performances with a drag outfit and fitting self-moderation, tolerance for amateurish performance in all of the details goes way way up because the details then support one another and are not individually judged. And the resulting positive jibe from the audience then in return makes you feel good about the whole and improves the delivery.
It's kind of frustrating when you are in full control of your performance and yet the audience does not feel the same kind of coherence or satisfaction than they do when given a good playback show. Just ask Frank Farian who got himself performance fronts like "Boney M" and "Milli Vanilli" for his creations and they were well-accepted (certainly more so than when he performed live himself) until the ruse was up (with "Milli Vanilli" the fallout was quite more serious).
Play your accordion with a clarinet sound, and the audience will likely be a lot happier when there is a mime on stage waving a clarinet around, like typical "musicians" in motion pictures that are hard to look at for actual musicians but make for better visuals than the old geezers typically doing the music takes.
I never thought the acoustic accordion was very realistic for the clarinet sound. Now, take Roland's #130 Clarinet -- Wow there is no comparison. If all you want is authentic accordion sounds, then only use an acoustic accordion.
Thomas N
Well-known member
For $8000 it should do both well.
I agree, but there will be the purists out there, that need that "classic" acoustic accordion sound.
Case in point. There are many "clonewheel" organs that duplicate the Hammond B3 very well. But the purists say it's not the same. That's because it's very difficult to duplicate the mechanical tonewheel generator that had 48 steel bins with 2 tonewheels in each bin for the 91 note generator (5 wheels were blanks for balance). With this design there was "crosstalk" between bins and across bins that gave the B3 that "Hammond sound". Even today with Hammond Suzuki's current solid state B3, they have 9 contacts under each key (one for each drawbar). Before this, Suzuki's B3 had one contact for each key, since, with chip technology, the 9 drawbars could be created. Customers complained - "the sound" is not the same. This is because the nine separate contacts would contact the common busbar at different times during the key travel -- 9th drawbar first and 1st drawbar last. Surprisingly, the sound was different, even when a key was pressed very fast. So, the current B3 has 549 contacts instead of 61 for a 61 note console keyboard. That has to increase the B3 cost, but the purists love it and have to have it.
I don't play my Roland to get "real" accordion sounds! When I want the real thing I play acoustic. "It's not a real accordion" people say. Of course it is not, it's digital! We can hear, for instance, in the higher and lower octaves, that they simply took mid-range sampled sounds and altered the pitch. So what? It's fun to have 21 accordions with 14 registers at my fingertips. I don't really care for the orchestral sounds but they are there for added fun. For gigging and recording, nothing beats a pluggable instrument.
I know! But the people who joined to work on the accordion products must come from somewhere!
Ventura
Been here for ages!
Piano has something special going for it too..
it is safe.. familiar.. always the same whether it has Aeolion Rollers, Chips,
Louis the 15th Styling, or rolls out like a rug..
a piano is a piano is a piano.. you kit a key it goes "Plink"
something cool that also came from the recently mentioned
Dennis Houlihan, was that he realized this truth about the Piano,
so when the new Technics 88 key ensembles were in development
and he noted how easily one could get lost in all the switching possibilities
and presets and lights and bouncing balls and and and
he insisted they add one more button to the ensembles.. a BIG button,
bigger than all the rest, with a Big Red Dot in the middle of it..
if you got mixed up.. if things started to get away from you..
don't panic, just HiT ThAt BuTTon and *poof*
it's just a Piano again
sort of like the (icon of the scream) panic button that was on early
versions of cakewalk
a fast way to for sure get back to what is comfy, what is familiar,
what you can count on, and it will always be revered for it's essence.
Digital Piano has had no peer for R&D efforts to study, understand,
and improve the simulation of an acoustic in the digital realm
for awhile the landmarks came in the basic waveform generation and software,
of which Roland had the first breakthrough when they married the sampled
first moment of the key hitting the string with the more affordable
decay sustain release of the synthesized piano sound
(remember, they only had a pittance of RAM/ROM and computing power
to work with back then)
the result "tricked" our ear into believing it was a Piano, and it worked so well this
became a must-have in forward recording studios that did shows, soundtracks,
movies etc. as their bread and butter. The gig version became the go-to
stage piano for quite awhile..
as Memory chips became cheaper and available, more extensive sampling
came into play, every 6 months or so one company would leapfrog all
the others with their latest, more deeply saturated Piano wavebank. Then once
you got where chips could afford to have every note sampled on it's own,
you had cross sampling, that took a softly sampled piano and a full on powerful
sample set and criss-crossed them based on the velocity (delta) of the key..
then we got into 4 sets of samples blended to get one piano sound at all
levels, then (again technics) realized the physical switching was not getting
the most out of the software, introduced two separate switching "top-hats"
for each key, allowing a vast improvement in the "delta" which faster computing
could take advantage of then apply to the waveform. Next came literally a
Kawai Grand action stuffed in a roadcase with sensors and a MIDI out
to control a digital Piano sound module with meticulously sampled Kawai Grands..
talk about having real feel
there is a definite advantage in engineering your own keyboard and
physical switching to control the nuances of your own well crafted
waveform sets that you designed in house and understand thoroughly..
so just owning all kinds of software representations of a Piano, like
software for accordion sounds, and running them on a computer.. you are
still at the mercy of the PHYSICAL INTERFACE and it's limitations, as well
as MIDI and it's limitations.
there are digital piano's now available which do not use MIDI as the
control software at all for it's internal sound generation
so yes, the bragging rights have been and will likely remain
"man you gotta hear this Piano on my new Keyboard"
even though the R&D has matured to the point that even the lowliest
model Casio or off brand Import has a darned good Piano sound
Ventura
Been here for ages!
actually we have discussed this in many old threads and posts
following the history and breakups and take overs of other
Euro music electronics companies..
they came from the companies that went out of business mostly,
Elka, Siel, Crumar, and were absorbed into Korg italy or Roland italy
or ORLA which except for KORG also went out of business then on to
Dexibell for a few of them, while SOLTON/KETRON mostly stayed to
themselves
sometimes these people brought their bad habits and bad ideas..
there were oftentimes good reason those old Giants went bankrupt..
and you must also consider the employment laws and regulations
enforced in Europe, which play a big part in these histories..
CPez
Member
A Ferrari is a Car........ but do you buy it to go to the grocery store? I sure hope not haha.
