Seaboard, actually pretty good
Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2018 6:08 pm
I had my doubts. Especially after I read their marketing material. ("It'll help you look real cool at the coffee shop." -- ewww, yuck! & I make my own coffee.) And it seems like an Apple product. ("This instrument product is disabled pending registration. Please tell us the name of your firstborn, for security purposes.")
Haha, please excuse my fun; it's all irrelevant to the actual instrument -- which has some mixed reviews, so I was ready to be disappointed. But it was immediately easy, and after a couple days, I can say I definitely like it. Impossible to play the English Suites on it; you'd have to be a technical genius, and the "white" keys don't go all the way up the way you'd want for proper ergonomics. So if you try to play something technical, it's a lot of wrist tweaking or a ton of practice to nail the white spaces between the black keys. However, if you approach it completely differently, it's a lot like playing fretless stringed instrument (fretless electric bass especially). Good for composing/improvising with a sloppy approach. Conducive to a different style from technical piano.
So anyway I'm still learning and setting it up. Tomorrow I'll interface it with a Behringer D, see how that goes. Then a Minitaur, that might be great. Sadly no Solaris yet -- I'm on the list for the next batch of Solaris synths.
If you're reading this and you've played a Seaboard with Solaris, please tell me how it works. I don't really understand MPE fully. (I just know it works partly with some stuff.) But Solaris is polyphonic aftertouch (though its built-in keyboard is not, right?)... Which I think means that you can do pitch & "brightness" bending per-note. Please correct me!
Anyway, the seaboard is great at doing per-note bends and vibrato and brightness stuff. It's really a great thing to bend one note and not all of them. (Like on guitar -- you know! Bend to unison.)
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Oh and by the way I'm steve breslin, first time post. I do mostly video game stuff. (In fact, voice recording mostly.) A pleasure to be joining you!
Haha, please excuse my fun; it's all irrelevant to the actual instrument -- which has some mixed reviews, so I was ready to be disappointed. But it was immediately easy, and after a couple days, I can say I definitely like it. Impossible to play the English Suites on it; you'd have to be a technical genius, and the "white" keys don't go all the way up the way you'd want for proper ergonomics. So if you try to play something technical, it's a lot of wrist tweaking or a ton of practice to nail the white spaces between the black keys. However, if you approach it completely differently, it's a lot like playing fretless stringed instrument (fretless electric bass especially). Good for composing/improvising with a sloppy approach. Conducive to a different style from technical piano.
So anyway I'm still learning and setting it up. Tomorrow I'll interface it with a Behringer D, see how that goes. Then a Minitaur, that might be great. Sadly no Solaris yet -- I'm on the list for the next batch of Solaris synths.
If you're reading this and you've played a Seaboard with Solaris, please tell me how it works. I don't really understand MPE fully. (I just know it works partly with some stuff.) But Solaris is polyphonic aftertouch (though its built-in keyboard is not, right?)... Which I think means that you can do pitch & "brightness" bending per-note. Please correct me!
Anyway, the seaboard is great at doing per-note bends and vibrato and brightness stuff. It's really a great thing to bend one note and not all of them. (Like on guitar -- you know! Bend to unison.)
--
Oh and by the way I'm steve breslin, first time post. I do mostly video game stuff. (In fact, voice recording mostly.) A pleasure to be joining you!