Originally Posted By: eddie1261
Well all of that is good to know, Notes, (and a great flex, by the way) but the question really meant "How complex of a piece of gear will you tolerate"? This Kurzweil is a fantastic sounding board but the manual is like advanced calculus. 147 pages of complex information similar to what the Chinese train schedules must have looked like. <...snip...>

I understand and feel your pain wink

I have a Roland XV-5050 that I bought to use with my Wind MIDI controller. I'm sure it's a very powerful unit, but the manual is way beyond my synth programming knowledge. It may as well be written with Kanji characters for me. I wouldn't understand it any less if it did.

My solution: I went to a company called Patchman Music, and Matt the programmer also plays and makes patches for wind synthesis.

Without that, it would be useless for me.

I checked out his website and he does some Kurzweil work https://www.patchmanmusic.com/kurzweilK2000.html

I mostly use a Yamaha VL70m for wind synthesis. It's physical modeling synthesis makes it seem like I am playing an instrument, instead of controlling a synthesizer. I can modify patches on the VL to suit my playing style, I can't even begin to that with the XV.

However, the VL is monophonic. If I want to play a horn section, all I get is one horn.

The XV is polyphonic. The Patchman bank has a nice horn section. Plus it has a few other things the VL lacks, a good steel drum, B3, vibes plus voice patch and a few more that are great for background parts, but unlike the VL, not as expressive for leads.

The XV also comes with thousands of other patches that I'll probably never use because I can't figure out how to even modify them for wind synthesis. But that's OK, it does what I bought it to do.

Notes ♫

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks