Kurzweil PC3 And PC3X: Across The Street From Disneyland With Rocky Raccoon
What do you do when your engineering team is whittled down to five, and you only have the resources to make one new product before Winter NAMM 2008 arrives? You do what the team at Kurzweil did -- make a product that has it all, and though the PC3 / PC3X are technically two products, they're very much packed with everything Kurzweil could fit into them.
David Weiser talks about the making and philosophy behind these keyboards before treating our ears to a little performance.
BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Bill Holland and we are live in Anaheim at Winter NAMM 2008. I'm here with David Weiser from Kurzweil.
DAVID WEISER: Hi.
BILL HOLLAND: Thanks for joining me.
DAVID WEISER: Nice to see you.
BILL HOLLAND: And we're looking at the PC3 and PC3X. Now, this is a new -- These are both new workstations from Kurzweil. Tell me a little bit about both of these.
DAVID WEISER: These are the -- This is the new flagship for us. It's something for everyone. We wanted to do something that would appeal to the broadest demographic possible. This product was speced out when our engineering staff was really low, down to five guys, and we speced out -- We could only -- We had the resources to only do one product, so we had to make sure that it did everything well, so we call this the solid gold Swiss Army knife. It does everything: piano samples, vintage keys, orchestral string sections, virtual analog, Hammond B3 simulator. It does everything really, really well. We don't think anything in the industry is going to be able to match the sound quality o the depth, the detail that you get here.
It's got over 900 programs, many of the classic ones are named after classic songs, so instead of Wurlitzer Model 200 you get Ray Charles, you know, the name of the song, you get a Stevie Wonder name of a song. Clavinets have wah pedals assigned. Everything sounds just like it did on the album. It's for the classic stuff. A whole new set of pianos, we have some classic Kurzweil pianos that are big and full and rich, but then we have some what I called flavored pianos. We have like Leon Russell playing in a blues album in the '70s, Rubinstein in the '50s playing through a tube compressor. We have the Rocky Raccoon sound that's a piano I did for Brian Wilson's Smile album, a real good tack piano detuned thing.
What else do we give you? I did a synthesis to imitate the resonant soundboard of a real piano, using sine waves to come in and kind of interact with each other when the sustain pedal is down, computer magic. We have a huge collection of virtual analog sounds in here, and if you are a tweaker and a real synth person, you can go in and layer 32 layers of synthesis into one another, four-pole filters like 32 times in succession, really high-powered stuff. Again, I don't think anyone else in the industry is doing this sort of thing. A lot of fun. Do you have any questions?
[DAVID WEISER PERFORMING ON THE KURZWEIL PC3]
Wow! I really want one of
Wow! I really want one of those! It's got more voice generation options than any other board near this price.
Kurzweil PC3x
*_*... O_O those pianos are something else!
Noooo, don't stop playing! I
Noooo, don't stop playing! I wanna hear the KB3 with the new Leslie sims, and the VA-1, and..and..
yes, this is it
this is one hot workstation. I can't even explain how beautiful it sounds on a pair of good monitors.
Great synths but...
Why ruin the effect by using the worst possible media players :(
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