All things being equal...
Aug 11, 2014
A Little Help From Our Friends
For a change from converting KN7000 Styles (and something of a break from website programming) I spent some time playing this weekend. I remember when I first brought my KN7000 home, just playing some of the sounds and rhythms and listening to the quality of the instrument. Recently it hasn't sounded quite the same. So I took a look through some of the settings and realised that the main equaliser was set to 'Flat'.
A quick adjustment later, listening to various instruments and adjusting the equaliser, I had that delightful overall mix back again. So if you're feeling a little uninspired recently it might be worth you delving into your equaliser settings and spicing things up a little.
Program Menus > Reverb & Effect > Equaliser
I'm not going to suggest the settings to you because it's all a matter of personal taste but you will find that it makes quite a difference to the overall feel of the instrument. This also makes a massive difference to those Hammond Organ sounds, so make sure that you audition those when you are adjusting the equaliser.
In a Tazmanian Tiz
One of our members in Tazmania has been having problems with the sound system of his KN7000 and I'm waiting with bated breath to hear whether he gets it fixed easily. Actually he's been having a number of problems but that's a rather longer story and we've managed to resolve a few of those. This one is all about the speakers working on one side of the K7 but not on the other. I haven't heard of that problem before but hopefully there's a good local repair shop who can help. And the service manual is available on this site if necessary.
I've been looking through that manual myself and it has various diagnostic tests that can be performed without opening the instrument up, including tests of the sound system, so that might help.
My own reason for looking at the service manual is because someone has chipped the leading edge of one of my keys. Probably me in fairness but I can't bear to admit that to myself. However, I think I will live with it for now because I'm not up for opening up the enclosure.
Simple Hints
I have a couple of quick hints to share. The first one is about the built-in Styles. Even though there are hundreds of styles built-in to the KN7000, we 'get used to them' after a while and we also find ourselves returning to a few favourites regularly. Part of the variety of playing music is that we don't necessarily want the same sound banging away in the background all the time for different songs!
The Sound Arranger can help enormously with that because for each Rhythm we can set up an alternative set of instruments in our 'backing band'. And don't forget to change the drummer!!!
But my tip is more straightforward than that. Quite often I find the repetitive chord of a piano or guitar in the Style to be overbearing and intrusive. Particularly if I want to hear my own left hand work (even if it's not up to a lot!). Also, I might want my left hand to have a piano sound and find it clashing with my backing pianist who has other ideas for the same keys on his (or her) piano!
Sometimes Less is More
Just by muting some of the backing instruments you can add a vast amount of variety to the built-in rhythms. I've noticed that many of the commercial style disks do this too.
Mute out that piano or guitar and give yourself some space to add your own flavour to the arrangements. It can be less fussy and far more musical for some sings. Really easy and a nice contrast.
Let's face it... some of those intros are amazing but then I join in and don't have a hope of living up to the hype!
By muting some of that out and playing my own intro it can make the overall performance more consistent. This can be especially effective for those quiet jazz ballads where I want a clean backing band instead of every man and his dog,
Sounds you haven't even Heard! Do the Maths
Have you seen the specification of the KN7000?
1236 sounds (1187 sounds 2 organ drawbars 3 organ tabs 3 accordion registers 41 drum kits)
1187 sounds! Now take a look at the Sound Group buttons. There are 11 basic groups, each has 3 pages of 20 sounds.
11x3x20=660
So, my other simple hint today is to take a look in your Sound Explorer. If you have never gone digging in the Sound Explorer there are around 527 instruments in your KN7000 that you have never even heard! And that is before you even start editing them. Also assuming that you don't have any expansion cards.
Some of these sounds are truly astonishing, such as the Chiff Flute, which adds breathy high-end harmonics when you play the keys harder or the Flutter Flute Soloist who spits out a tremolo note if you play harder (I've used the Flutter Flute Soloist in the Movie Panther style, Music Style Arranger Variation 2, which you can download in the Members Area).
Okay, my maths might be slightly ropey but you get the picture!
New KN7000 Articles & More...
Over at KN7000.co.uk I have added an article to explain how to load the new Custom Styles from our Members Area into your keyboard. Now please consider these first styles to be an experiment, there are at least two glitchy notes that I know of and the intention is to put these Styles out there and get your feedback before updating them and then releasing more.
Other keyboards such as the Yamaha Tyros have a wealth of Styles available freely on the Internet and this helps the keyboard to sound fresh and interesting, so one of the aims of this community is to make Styles available for the KN7000.
I'm counting on you to help with that because, despite my wordy ramblings, this site is not about me and isn't sustainable by a single person. So, I'll be very grateful for all support, whether that is by completing our survey - Click Here (opens in a new window and takes 2 minutes) - or by sending in new styles (no commercial styles please) and including your comments around the site or posting in the forums.
We also receive many requests to hear people playing their KN7000 so we would all love to hear your recordings. You can attach files to your forum posts or email them to admin at technicskn7000 dot com and I'll put a page up with your recordings.
Thanks to everyone who has already completed the survey, it is starting to build an interesting picture of what you want.
Finally, an interesting fact for you. You can see the original version of this website in the Wayback Machine (opens in a new window) which is one of the main research tools used to resurrect the website after it was abandoned.
As the 'transient keeper' of the domain (who wants to live forever?) I can see the original statistics. This site currently receives three times more visitors per day than it ever received in it's original format and is growing by at least 20% per month.
Admittedly, that was before the days of Twitter - https://twitter.com/sxKN7000 - and Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TechnicsKN7000 - (yes, we're on there).
There are over 2000 page views per day and our logs show that you stay on the site between 1 and 40 minutes. If you are in the know about websites you will realise that these are phenomenal statistics, particularly the length of time (on most websites you can measure that in terms of a few seconds).
It makes me wonder just how many KN7000s there are in the world today and how long they will be around!
Mike (Admin)
I started playing Technics instruments in my early teens and I've owned several models of their organs and keyboards. As a former professional organist and keyboard player I have played most of the models that I haven't owned, so I'm pretty familiar with most Technics organs and keyboards.
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