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(More customer reviews)Now that all Kurzweil's can be layered and split, their glaring weakness is all the more conspicuous. The company, in my opinion, makes the best digital pianos--in terms of sound, versatility, and keyboard "feel"--but with the most convoluted, incoherent, least helpful instructions. Guaranteed to lead to many all-nighters for musicians just trying to "set up" the keyboard for the next day's gig, which may not have a bass player or drummer.
If you have q friend, or a knowledgeable techie/gear-head who works cheap, by all means hire him. The manual, as usual, looks like it's been written by a committee. After talking about the most "powerful" dimension of the keyboard as its adaptiveness to set-ups, it fails to explain or illustrate how to construct sounds in the favored "set-up," or "500," mode rather than the more limiting "performance" mode. It gives no directions or helpful illustrations on how the user might be able to use one of the factory set-ups (all of them unusable) as a "template" to help the user with the creation of his own more practical set-ups. It doesn't explain how to transpose a good acoustic bass sound up an octave into a playable range without having all of the notes in the treble, or right hand, also transposed, except into an unplayable range. It provides a paragraph on doing a "hard reset," so that the player can get rid of all the monstrosities he's created and start afresh--unfortunately the manual fails to provide the vital information that before the "reset" button will activate the instructions permitting a hard reset, the user must first depress the "Global" button. (By accident, and several hours later, I finally stumbled upon it.)
Whether the reader finds it merely curious or confounding, the manual will introduce and begin to discuss some of the specifics of splitting, layering, set-up programs, etc. Then in a late section of the book, the reader finds a paragraph stating that the instrument is capable of "layering and splitting, which means adding on another sound or dividing the keyboard into two or more zones so that different sounds can be played, a feature that can often be convenient for a musician, especially one who is playing in a show" (!!!). In other words, the paragraph sounds as though the authors are unaware that anything preceded it. Instead of specific instructions, we're given a reductive introduction that sounds like it belongs in the ad sheet! I's in details like this where Kurzweil seems determined to cut the corners, in the process cutting the frustrated user to shreds.
I could say that this latest Kurzweil gives me more problems when, during the middle of a fast-moving passage in the middle of a tune, I attempt to go from one program to another. Often the button doesn't register my quick press, the light blinks back at me when it should have changed--but for all I know I've programmed it wrong. The same goes for the sustain pedal. It's the slipperiest pedal I have yet to encounter on an electric keyboard. At one time, Roland marketed a pedal with a heel flap, which made eminent sense and was quite effective (enough reason to get rid of it in this inscrutable market). The bottom surface of this Kurzweil pedal is less abrasive than Kurzweil pedals I've had with my K1000, PC2, or PC1se, squirting across a linoleum floor like a hocky puck repeatedly over the course of a 4-hour job (might as well have been 40). Maybe that's the way they like them in Minnesota.
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