So my post count has been way down of late, mainly because I’ve been taking a massive hiatus from my computer, at least in a musical sense. In this time a few interesting pieces have come into the studio. The first of them is this:

The Kurzweil K2661. Kurzweils are somewhat of an anomaly in the keyboard workstation world. Whilst other manufacturers bring out new and updated keyboards every couple of years, Kurzweil have pretty much sat on their VAST based line of keyboards for nearly 20 years. There have been revisions of course, but nothing like the cash cow onslaught of other companies. As someone who has owned and made good use of many worstation keyboards over the years, I think this is because Kurzweil got it right in the first place.

The good points? – The sound should be top of the list. Although many of the preset sounds are a bit dated now (who the hell spends £1700 on a keyboard to use the presets anyway?), a little programming goes a long way, and I was quickly making bang-up-to-date sounds from big Hollywood strings to downright evil distorted DnB basses in no time. Points should also be awarded for KDFX, Kurzweil’s multi-FX system. I’d heard good things about this, but it exceeded my expectations by a long way in both its flexibility and its sound.

Any bad points? – Well the depth of the instrument can sometimes be daunting. I read somewhere that no two Kurzweils are ever the same and I can see why. The flexibility, not only of sound creation, but also of the control you can have, means that the Kurz can be setup to fit into your studio setup in ways you probably haven’t even considered, and whilst this is a good point, it does mean that you can feel a little alone because every Kurzweil ends up different, and as such, it makes it harder to connect with other Kurzweil users in a ‘support and share’ kind of way (although the Sonikmatter forums go along way to help).