[sdiy] Synth Keybards and Number of Keys

[Bob Weigel]

The trend began in early monosynths of course.  These machines had 
immediate access for octave shifting often.  EG> the arp pro-soloist and 
the many which followed with similar designs from Roland (SH1000, 2000 
etc.) Conn Electric Band, Yamaha SY1 and 2, Korg/Univox K-1, etc.   The 
thought was 1) they're monophonic..you can't play chords anyway 2) you 
can do nearly the same thing with an octave shifter as having the keys 
therefore, and 3) it doesn't take up the space OR challenge a playing 
holding a chord on an organ to sweep so widely with one hand if he can 
flick the switch and continue playing a solo in the lower register...

Obviously it cost less too. However these things were viable FEATURES to 
be reconciled with and I'm glad many of them are small. I'd have to have 
a much bigger studio if they all had 88 keys :-).  But for more flexible 
polyphonic machines certainly more keys is a nice thing.  Still with 
machines like the Polymoog the problem is obvious.  More keys = more 
ciruits.  Not just more keys.  As technology moved along though the cost 
became more and more just related to the actual keys themselves.  
However manufacturer's had become aware that in a rock band, many prefer 
the more compact units and get by with it within those constraints.  
Often stage space is limited unless you are a big act.   The 61 key 
machine moved into a position of dominance with the prophet 5 and 
Oberheim OB series and Jupiter 8.  When truly great machines come in 
that package it tends to color the rest of the industry.  The polysix 
and the rest that would follow from Korg save the poly800.  Yamaha would 
release various machines leading to the DX7 and they too got into the 
pattern of 61 key machines pretty consistently thereafter with the SY's 
etc. 

Later the tendency to offer machines with more keys started to come into 
play again as Kurzweil's K250 broke through with realistic sounds that 
made people convinced they were hearing a real piano. So why not have 88 
keys again?  More and more manufacturers would strive to put realistic 
pianos in their synth products and in accordance at least offer a 
version that had hammer action with 88 keys.  A few even offered reduced 
key numbers with simulated hammer action like the Roland/Rhodes MK60 I 
think it was with 64 keys, voiced by Harold Rhodes in part I was told.   
His son came by today btw.  He plays a Kurzweil K2600 and we're going to 
try to do a project together here as soon as we get some time.  Cool guy.

Anyway Kurzweil saw that the market was limited ...or the management did 
as they were sold to Young Chang...and they released the scaled down  
K1000 series and offered a couple different options including the 88 key 
K1200pro and the 76 key K1000 plus some rack units.  Yamaha had already 
done much of the market probing though with their myriad of DX products 
ranging from the little DX100 to the precursor GS 1 and 2 in full piano 
cabinet design.  They found that the 61 key DX7 simply sold the snot out 
of the other designs.   They offered the big DX1 with 76 keys simulated 
hammer action....the DX5 with 76 weighted keys...and the scaled down DX9 
with 4 operators instead of 6 and I guess a good number of those were 
sold at the lower price but people wanted the DX7 because of it's 
greater flexibility and because it was played by all the big artists of 
the time pretty much.  The big artists choose 61 key boards often 
because of their portability and adequacy in doing the kinds of 
performances that were being done. 

Today with the reintroduction of acoustic piano sounds more people 
bother to carry a hammer action 88 machine around.  But back then there 
were no piano sounds worth anything unless you wanted to pay 20 grand or 
so for a K250. And much of the music was driven by the synth craze that 
developed and that music employed a lot of sound oriented parts that 
didn't employ broad ranges of notes.  

So yeah the bottom line is sort of 'economics' but it goes far beyond 
just the cost of putting more keys on the board.  It has massively to do 
with demand in this case. When Yamaha got it right..a near million 
seller.  Others learned and followed with the Korg M1, the ROland 
D50......  btw I'm still trying to collect production numbers if anyone 
has references there on things besides Juno machines and Fender Chroma 
and Chroma Polaris...don't have much more.  Talked to Kawai and 
requested they ask Japan.  I'd love to see all that data.  -Bob

R. D. Davis wrote:

>Hi Everyone, hopefully the following questions aren't too far
>off-topic, but they'll appear more SDIYish by the end of the
>message. :-) 
>
>Something that puzzles me every now and then is the question of why so
>many synthesizers have been designed with less than eighty-eight keys.
>Going from a piano to a synth keyboard with only five octaves can be
>quite frustrating, but I see that many synths have even fewer than
>five octaves.  Organs, on the other hand, have even more keys to play
>with.  Given that synths could use far more keys, to divide the keys
>up into regions of different sounds, and, or, a truly usable range of
>frequencies, on two or three levels of keyboards (manuals?), plus
>pedals, why do 88-key keyboards, seem to be somewhat of a rarity, and
>organ-style keyboards almost unheard of?  One would think that synths
>keyboards would have begun taking on more of the appearance of mighty
>Wurlitzers, with all sorts of additional knobs and switches, by now.
>
>Getting to the SDIY angle of this post, how many here typically use
>more than one keyboard at a time with their SDIY projects, or retrofit
>organs with more than 88 keys for synths?  
>
>Happy SDIYing!
>
>Robert 
>
>  
>