I never get bored with the sounds of the Kawai K4.
Because of it’s AM soundsynthesis it can make very rare and strange sounds.
I made my first soundbank for the K4 using it's display -edited all parameters by
hand- and that took a long time. I found out that the use of a good editor
saves you a lot of time. But you need a good editor program to make real weird
sounds.
It’s difficult to control the soundparameters,
especially in combination with each other. Some combinations will give clicks.
With the KAWAI K4 soundchip version 1.2 the use of to much resonance
can even result in very loud clicks. The update, version 1.4,
has a build-in limiter to avoid these clicks, but it also limits the possibility
to create more rare and extreme sounds. So I'm happy with my 1.2 version K4.
I was very motivated to find a good editor for the K4. I was a member
of an Atari-magazine with a public domain collection and found some good editors (demo's &
shareware). Most of these editors where made in Germany, because the K4 in
combination with Atari was very popular in those days. I think the two best editors
(both shareware) are:
K4 bank-loader/manager(K4_EDIT) & K4 sound-robotter(K4_ISCPD)
The K4 bank-loader/manager bugs sometimes when receiving data from the synth,
it will give the message: wrong data received.
When this happens, reboot or restart the program and it will work properly.
It's better to run it from floppy disk, on harddisk it sometimes bugs too.
Extensions you can save:
ALL - all data / BLOCK - voices, multies, effects & drums data / ONE or PART -
for single sound, multi, effect & drum snd. You can also rename your parts in ONE.
The sound robotter is a demo version. Not all of the parameters will
work in advanced mode. But in simple mode it's possible to generate good sounds.
A sound-robotter machine will generate sounds, fast and easy,
based on existing sounds. Therefore you must load 5 sounds and set your parameters :
You can combine sounds, mix or randomise the parameters.
With your left mouse button you can generate sounds and with your right you can place
them in a new bank, save the bank and.....you're ready.......august 2001...MNX2010