SOUNDS
We have room for just a handful of standout sound categories, so here are the ones with the most new stuff going on relative to the PC2 or K series. For coverage of more PC3 sounds, including drum kits, read the expanded review online at www.keyboardmag.com
Pianos. These use the same raw materials as the PC2’s triple-strike grands, but the programming is all new. Some go 14 layers deep (a single Program can have up to 32 layers) and since each layer is effectively its own synthesizer, the PC3 achieved a range of harmonic and dynamic response to my touch that far surpassed what I’d expect from any keyboard with a total of 256MB of waveform ROM. If you told me “Standard Grand” or “Grand Evans” was from a piano plug-in that took up half a hard drive, and I didn’t know better, I might even believe you. “Horowitz Grand” is another fave — it cuts through a band but is still full-bodied. On top of this, a broad selection of “character pianos” comes off like actual scholarship went into it, which is a refreshing change from “Let’s detune it and call it a honky-tonk.”
Vintage Keys. If you’ve gigged much on workstations or digital stage pianos, you probably have one or two each of Rhodes, Wurly, and Clav sounds that you actually use, and maybe a CP electric grand patch for ’80s covers. The PC3 serves up a couple dozen or more variations on each, and I promise you’ll find happy homes in your set list for most of them. Don’t even get me started on the sheer amount of dead-on Mellotron, Pianet, and RMI Programs. There’s an unprecedented effort here to recreate the “sonic memories” of how these keyboards were processed and recorded in the tunes that made them famous. It’s not all about drenching them in effects, either — the PC3’s KDFX are put to great use, but bypass them, and you’ll still hear plenty of, well . . . balls. In particular, the Rhodes patches’ detail rivals any modeling plug-in I’ve tried.
Organs. The PC3 improves on Kurzweil’s KB3 organ mode in several ways. It’s the best-sounding incarnation yet, you get a fader for every drawbar, and the mod wheel usually brings in some tubey overdrive. Because KB3 uses a lot of processing power, it can still “speak” on only one MIDI channel at a time — organ splits in Setup mode need a non-KB3 organ sound for one part or the other — but since the PC3 has more DSP muscle than K series synths, you can have a lot more “regular” sounds going on at the same time as KB3 without hitting the polyphony wall. The sound doesn’t quite kill a current dedicated clonewheel (e.g. Hammond XK-3c), but it’s more than good enough to make you think twice about carrying one to the same gig as you would a PC3.
Synths. You know those jokes where a musician goes to heaven and it’s a big jam session? The PC3 would be set up on the synth fanatics’ cloud. I found stuff that perfectly evoked P-Funk, A Clockwork Orange, Depeche Mode, Peter Gabriel, Tangerine Dream, Thomas Dolby, Vangelis, Weather Report, Pete Townshend’s keyboard work with the Who, and a Neptunesesque approach to urban pop — and that was just in the ten minutes after powering on for the first time.
Though the PC3 bases some excellent analog synth sounds on sampled waveforms, the big news is that it also does modeling: “KVA waveforms” are straight outta the VA-1, an incredible-sounding virtual analog synth that Kurzweil’s former parent company punted. For authenticity, the PC3 will stand next to any dedicated virtual analog synth without flinching. To see just how analog that was, I even compared it with a Minimoog Voyager Old School. Yes, the Moog was creamier, but the difference was less than I expected. Programs can use KVA and sampled layers in any combination, fostering cool hybrid sounds. I can think of no other do-it-all stage keyboard or workstation where this level of virtual analog synthesis is integrated this fully. Okay, the Korg OASYS, but it costs thousands more.
Strings. The Strings bank (different from the Strings category in the Base banks) is all new, and though software libraries have raised our expectations of sampled strings to new heights, it’s surprising just how far these 128 patches rise to meet them. Will they kick Vienna off your hard drive if you’re a pro film composer? No. If that hard drive crashes, do you get enough articulations and rosined realism to keep four out of five directors smiling? Yes. Is this as good as strings get in a keyboard? By miles.
If there’s a relatively weak spot in the PC3, it’s the acoustic and electric guitars. They’re not bad, and shred-ready Programs like “Burning Tubes” are even lots of fun. They just don’t quite have the face-grabbing realism everything else in the PC3 does.
RIFFS AND ARPEGGIOS
New in the PC3 is that any zone in Setup mode (where you do splits, layers, and such) can play its own “Riff.” Technically, Riffs are just MIDI sequences from Song mode, so you can record your own or use presets — I stopped counting around 250. Informally, they’re a few bars long, and usually just one sound on one track. Settings that get saved with each Setup manage Riff behavior: which keys or MIDI controls trigger and silence them, whether they stick to the original key or transpose with your playing, whether they loop or play one-shot, whether they sync to another zone (good for locking a bass or rhythm guitar Riff to a drum Riff), and whether they come in as soon as you hit the key or wait for the next beat of the current measure (or the first beat of the next measure). A setup can have up to 16 Riff-enabled zones, so Riffs are a very flexible way to get some phrase-based action into your performance. It all sounds complex, but really, there are only a couple of menus to wrap your brain around before things get way fun, way fast.
Where the K series had one arpeggiator, the PC3 has 16 — enough for every zone in a maxed-out Setup to do a different thing. Arpeggios are independent of Riffs, and OS version 1.3 replaces the garden-variety up/down stuff with 29 patterns based on scales, chords, and various proggy licks. You can make and save your own, too: Cursor to a pattern name, hit Edit, and up comes a step screen where you add or delete steps (up to 48) and dial in the musical interval of each.
I didn’t expect that the same Setup could use multiple Riffs with different time signatures, but I tested this using phrases I’d created, then added some arpeggios I’d made with odd step lengths, and the PC3 played everything without missing a beat! The possibilities for complex, evolving contrapuntal performances go very deep, and Kurzweil’s cred with loop- and step-oriented artists just went way up.
GIGGING
Since Dave Bryce jumpstarted this review by waking me up that Saturday, it was only fair to put him to work. Thus, we begin with his thoughts after taking his PC3 to many gigs:
“I’d been trying to find the keyboard that’d work perfectly in both my bands: a seven-piece horn band that does R&B, funk, and pop, and a classic rock jam band,” says Dave, “After trying out many of the usual suspects, I decided to go with the PC3 in its 76-key version. Its size and weight are perfect; and while I’d thought for sure I’d need fully-weighted keys to handle the piano-type duties, I find the semi-weighted action of the PC3 extremely playable: smooth and fast without being too light at all.
“Sonically, it’s everything I was after. Way too many keyboards come out of the box with a bunch of shiny, spectacular patches that are fun to play in the music store, but often useless in the real world. The PC3 is exactly the opposite — most of its Programs aren’t terribly glamorous at first blush, but they fit effortlessly into my music. Some of my keyboards sound great in the studio or through a stereo PA, but don’t cut it very well when I play through a single box (even though my combo amp is a Motion Sound KP200S with stereo speakers). The PC3 more than delivers in this area, much better than the ’board it replaced. Bandmates tell me they can hear my parts more clearly than ever, which actually lets me keep my onstage volume lower.”
My own experience is a lot like Dave’s, the major difference being that I play through either a Mackie SRM450v2, Bose L1 Model II, or more recently, the Acoustic Image amp reviewed on page 96. Through any of these, the PC3 has an almost creepy way of sounding right in just about any room, and of letting me be heard without stepping on other instruments’ frequency ranges.
One more thing: Since the K2000, “patch remain” has let you switch Programs while holding down notes, without those notes cutting off. You’d hear a “bump” in the sound as the effects changed along with the Program. On the PC3, no more bump, because the effects for the lameduck notes stay the same as well. If you play the new Program over the old, its effects will be the right ones. This is a first.
STUDIO USE
We’ve raved so much about the PC3 in a live context that you may wonder, “But would you record with these sounds?” In a heartbeat. The realism, meat, and play-nicewith- others quality is just as beneficial to a multitrack mix as it is on a gig, and sometimes, I found that a given electric piano, string, synth lead, or pad from the PC3 sat in my track better than a plug-in dedicated to that type of sound.
The sequencer’s timing sounds much tighter to my ears than on any previous Kurzweil instrument, and the “Big” page, which displays a large bars/beats readout, is a welcome addition. Other than some sensible organization tweaks to the edit pages, the PC3’s Song mode handles very similar to the K2600’s. Which is to say, it’s a powerful multitrack idea pad, but squinty to navigate by today’s standards of color screens and DAW-like graphics on workstation keyboards. Then again, Kurzweil intends the PC3 as performance axe first and workstation second, so think of the sequencer as a bonus. It is what makes Riffs possible, and would be well worth its portion of the PC3’s price even if it did nothing else.
CONCLUSIONS
The Kurzweil PC3 is truly the ultimate gig machine. For versatility and realism, its sounds slam the balls out of the park and into the next county. It takes work to find a Program that won’t plaster an ear-to-ear grin across your face as you begin to remember the chords to “that” song. Compare it to any do-every-sound keyboard anywhere near its price — whether that keyboard has a cutting-edge sequencer with color graphics or no sequencer at all — and you won’t find the PC3’s tonewheel organ and analog modeling on top of the usual sample-playback synthesis. Sound designers will love the fact that any layer in a Program can feed its output into any other layer’s signal chain, which is something else you don’t see on just any workstation. All this adds up to real musical instrument that, while not exactly cheap, is a world-beating value — and an obvious Key Buy winner.
PROS
Tons of fabulous, gig-ready sounds. Vintage keys and synths are especially awesome. VAST synth engine is Kurzweil’s deepest and most flexible ever. Arpeggiators and “Riffs” are serious tools for phrase-based production and performance.
CONS
LCD display is cramped for sequencing and sound programming. Would be nice to see knobs in addition to faders on a keyboard at this price.
INFO
PC3 (76 semi-weighted keys): $2,830 list/$2,295 MAP; PC3X (88 fully-weighted keys): $3,630 list/$2,995 MAP, www.kurzweilmusicsystems.com
HANDS-ON
1.Main and aux stereo outputs are all 1/4" balanced — yes!
2.Nine faders are usually mapped with synth settings like filter cutoff and resonance on the left and effects amounts towards the right. In KB3 mode, they become organ drawbars.
3.These buttons select main sound banks in Program mode, toggle vibrato, percussion, and Leslie effect in KB3 mode, and turn zones on or off in Setup (split/layer) mode.
4.Two pro touches if your studio is heavy on digital audio: Stereo S/PDIF output does rates from 44.1 to 192kHz, and a “Sync in” jack lets you clock that output from an incoming S/PDIF line.
5.In Program mode, this Info button lists how each fader, the mod wheel, and other controllers affect the sound.
6.Blue-white LCD is crisp, but a bit cramped by today’s standards.
7.Select sounds by instrument category with these buttons, but be aware that categories are “firm” only in the Base 1 and Base 2 sound banks.
8.You can save Programs, Setups, and Songs to an xD card, though SD might have been preferable as it’s becoming the dominant consumer format.
PC3 DESKTOP EDITOR
We tried a beta of this cool tool just as we went to press, and though some functions weren’t yet implemented, it grabbed all the PC3’s internal data without a hitch. We also heard changes we made onscreen reflected in real time on the PC3. In short, we saw enough to look forward to the final release, which we’ll keep you updated on.
NEED TO KNOW
What is it? A keyboard workstation geared for live performance, with particular strengths in vintage keys, organs, synths, and orchestral sounds.
How does it make sounds? Most are sample-based, but the PC3 does true modeling of drawbar organs (KB3 mode) and analog synths (KVA waveforms) as well.
Can I produce a song on it? It has a full multitrack sequencer with trackbased and event-list editing, loop recording, punch-in/out, and other common features, but no audio recording.
What previous Kurzweil synths does it resemble? You’d think the PC2, but the PC3 is closer to a massively- updated K2600 workstation.
What does it have that the K2600 didn’t? Power to run roughly three times the effects at once, virtual analog modeling, 16 arpeggiators, 128-voice polyphony to the K’s 48, and the ability to trigger musical phrases called Riffs from Setup mode. Many more internal sounds come standard as well.
Does the K2600 have anything that the PC3 doesn’t? Audio inputs and a sampling option, AIFF and WAV file import, and a built-in ribbon controller (though the PC3 has an input for one).
What is VAST? Variable Architecture Synthesis Technology, Kurzweil’s “virtual modular synth” sound structure. A basic signal chain (algorithm) has “blanks” that get filled in with oscillators, filters, and other processors.
Is there sound expansion? Not yet, but bank buttons and card slots for two expansion boards suggest that there may be — in the future.
Who is it for? Gigging and studio keyboardists, from demanding pros to hobbyists who just love really realistic sounds.