From bruce@ashbysolutions.com Sat May 15 08:35:55 2004
Subject:Re: XK-3 Miscellany

Hi All,

I've been watching the XK-3 mania from the sidelines -- both because of financial limitations and because it's a 1-manual clone. It seems like a pretty cool clone, though, and it definitely raises the bar on tweakability -- something that makes the engineer/programmer side of my personality salivate! Here's my $0.02 on some of the things I've seen in the threads over the past week or so:

1. Expression Pedal "Option" -- H-S has been using this feature/trick/ploy for years. An expression pedal is an OPTION? I don't buy it; an expression pedal is a necessity. The only reason to make it an option is to hit a better price point for the organ itself in the marketing collateral. Before deciding if the XK-3 is right for you, add in the price of the expression pedal. If the dealer has to special-order the pedal, make sure you get it prior to buying the organ.

2. Wheel Brake ("Power Down Effect") -- This is a nice feature on my Korg, but not an absolute necessity. It's the kind of effect that sounds cool once or twice a night; annoying once or twice a set. In many cases, the pitch wheel will provide a close enough approximation.

3. Chorus/Vibrato All-or-None -- This is a more serious gaffe, IMHO. It's especially frustrating to see because H-S has been doing this for years, and has been dinged for the omission in the past. It's also disappointing because it looks like the designers spent a lot of time on the little details that make a B-3 unique, yet missed this one. It's one of the nice things about my BX-3: the ability to add vibrato to either manual or both, at MY discretion. Left-hand bass with vibrato is just plain wrong, and left hand comping with vibrato is sometimes even worse.

4. A Cheap Dual-Manual "XK-4" -- It's not going to happen. The dual-manual market is very small these days, and the only reason to do one is to satisfy the players (like yours truly) that just HAVE to have two manuals sitting in just the right place. Small market + unique features = higher price. If H-S comes out with a dual-manual XK-3 (and the B-3P is not what I mean here), expect the price to be around $3500-4000 street -- almost as much as buying two XK-3s -- or maybe even a little more, depending on the cabinet and such.

5. MIDI Implementation -- This is a personal question I'm tossing out. Every H-S clone since the XB-2 (and maybe XB-3?) has used an unusual -- some might say bizarre -- method of mapping all nine drawbars of each manual to one MIDI CC#. This is possible because 9 drawbars * 9 positions = 81 choices; however it's counter to "normal" MIDI implementation, and makes slaving other non-H-S products to the XB-2, XK-2, etc. nearly impossible. Does anyone know if the XK-3 follows suit? (I suspect that it does.)

Why is this last point important? Because a year or two from now, another vendor will leapfrog the XK-3, and list members will again be stricken with H.A.S. Right now, if I wanted to (and I don't), I could use my BX-3 to drive a V5+, an Electro Rack,or a B4/EVB3 soft-synth, simply by re-mapping the drawbars to the proper MIDI CC values. Some of the other clones can't re-map their MIDI data, but a MIDI Solutions Mapper will fix that up. A VK-8/8m is a little trickier because it uses MIDI SysEx, but the Mapper can probably fix that, too. The H-S implementation I described above is another story: it's unlike any other commercially-available slider/knob/drawbar scenario, so there aren't available solutions to the problem. Without some slick programming in between the pieces, an XK-2 can only be slaved to another H-S product.

Regards,

-BW
--
Bruce Wahler
Ashby Solutions™ http://music.ashbysolutions.com
978.386.7389 voice/fax
bruce@ashbysolutions.com