Here is my "Music Room"

[keybdwiz]

Thought that I'd post a few pictures of my little Music Room... where I like to lock myself away and jam out on ELP tunes all day and night... hee hee hee

[markone]

There is some lovely kit there... That C3 - Yum.

And you have a Kurzwel. Is that a K2500? I have started looking at the Pc3, but nowhere around here has one for demo.

Great pics thanks for sharing.

I'll get imagescapegirl to hunt out some pics of my 'studio'

[Imagescapegirl]

These are a few photos already on Photobucket ....

Since these first ones, Mark has switched computers ... Going Apple ...







Man at work! ;D







And working with the bass playing nephew ... recording Mark's first CD release ...

[keybdwiz]

Oh MY... That is an AWESOME looking setup .........

What is the large "Alesis" keyboard on the bottom of the stack ? Looks really cool.

PS.... Apple is the only way to go

[markone]

The Alesis is the ill fated Fusion 8HD. A keyboard that *should* have ruled the world, but suffered a combination of circumstances that saw the product discontinued after only 18 months.

Firstly consider the specs:

A Dual DSP sound engine with 64MB of sample memory expandable to 384MB, and enough horsepower to provide 192 voices of poly. A proper sampler in the AKAI S series vein with almost limitless modulation options because it uses a matrix routing system, where pretty much everything can be a source and a destination. It also has sampling inputs so you can sample your own stuff (though the sample editing is a bit arcane on a little display, if you are used to using PC.)

Couple that with a 180GB internal hard drive. It's expandability sound-wise is almost limitless.

It doesn't end there. There is a 3 oscillator virtual analogue synth in there too that has 8 different filter types and access to the same mod matrix, and you can add an external signal as a sound source too.

Then there is a 6 operator FM synth, which can be very DX7 like, but can use the filters and envelopes from the main synth too.

But, wait, there is a Physical Modelling synth in there too, with models for reed and tube, and yes, you guessed it access to the filters and envelopes.

Then there is the 16 track sequencer, coupled to the 8 input audio record-to-disk function, ADAT digital I/O.

An effects section with inserts and sends and FX chaining, some great reverbs, rotary speaker, amp models, plus the usual chorus, phase, etc.

Then there is a performance mode where all of the above can be freely mapped to 8 layers and zones across the board for some incredible performance capabilities.

In other words: A beast.

Now the bad news. Korg brought out the OAYSIS at the same time. Alesis rushed the Fusion to market to try and capitalise on the distinct similarities between the two boards (Hard Disk, multiple synthesis types, sequencing) and in doing so brought it to market missing some key features.

The planned vocoder functionality was never implemented - but was shown as a feature on the carton, the sampler Inputs have no access to the sound engine inputs, so the capability to resample sounds and create new samples which Rolands do so well is just impossible.

The sequencer lacks the pattern sampling capabilities the other big 3 have - It's really a track sequencer, but again there was planned pattern based functionality that never made it into the board, so you can't select pattern on the fly while playing.

There was a planned tonewheel emulation mode that Alesis talked about in an interview, which never appeared.

And a really major omission - they never implemented MIDI sysex. You can't edit this thing remotely. Period. Actually MIDI generally is pretty underspec'd compared to the competition. Don't try and use this thing as a master keyboard on stage. It also has a very strange response to velocity - internally it is well behaved but for external instruments you need to edit the velocity curve to make them playable.

There were a lot of software bugs in the V1.0 software and the board quickly got a reputation as buggy, and despite Alesis working on updates and addressing most of the issues, the damage was done. Sales weren't picking up and they dropped the price, which enraged some early adopters who mounted a fairly vicious hate campaign across the forums. IN the end Alesis cut their losses, closed down the development, stopped production and blew out the remaining units a silly price.

It's flaws are many. But it is such a powerful beast, that provided you work around them, it is an amazing board to play, and soundware developers Hollow Sun in the UK and KPR in Germany have provided a treasure store of libraries for it.

I wonder what would have happened if Alesis had given themselves 6 months more to properly develop it. I suspect that they would have released a 2nd generation by now and have had a runaway success on their hands. As it is the parent company (Numark) have stopped all Alesis keyboard release, preferring to utilise the Akai brand to continue that. Which is a huge shame.

[jenia]

Your studios look SO awesome guys!!! For gigs we only have Triton and a Roland Hammond Module (which is really something!!!), all other stuff comes from software sample libraries...

[keybdwiz]

Sorry Mark... I just realized that I never answered you, about the Kurzweil keyboard... So sorry.

Yes, it is a Kurzweil K2500X

A somewhat older keyboard, but I really love it... ;D