jesussaddle
Power User
Quick story for perspective.
My band's Keyboard player recently bought a new and pretty expensive keyboard (a well known & respected brand), and for some reason it was my job to get the thing connected to our PA, I saw it had two 1/4 inch jack line outs on the rear panel, for connection to an external source. I thought i'd check the manual to see if these were balanced or not. The manual says nothing about it. As if the outs were just an afterthought anyway. Also, there appears to be no expression pedal socket on it either, just pedal sockets which are for the brand's own multi piano pedal only. All this before we even get to (lack of) updates for the product.
It's instantly clear that the manufacturer has built this thing up to a price point, so it can compete with other products on the market. Any appointments deemed superfluous are binned in favour of the bare minimum requirements.
Now, that's when it becomes instantly clear how spoiled and very lucky us FAS users are. If we want to route or connect the unit a certain way, we can. It's all there if we need it, plus a whole lot more.
Then we get these updates, and okay, some like them, others don't. You don't have to do the updates, but the option is there which is very cool.
I have bought keyboards assuming there would be an expression jack OR pedal jack. I mean, how unlikely it would be that these jacks would not be included. But they sometimes aren't. This is a great thing to be wary of if you're a trusting buyer and are shopping for one. My Korg Micro Key 61 has no jacks - I sometimes use multiple keyboards on the same MIDI channel (only one of my keyboards, the Impulse 61, has jacks.) There may be a workaround for people who want to split the expression CC to multiple instruments within a softsynth environment. So far I haven't done that, but it should be possible using a MIDI utility. (I mean that I could, for instance, octave shift one of the keyboards and be able to use the pedal for a range beyond the 61 keys, or switch from regular sized keys to small ones if I simply wanted to play some stretchy piano chords that are impossible on a regular-key-size keyboard.
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