Kawai K-11

Not really easy as itself, but it is nice with additional Software available at http://www.geocities.com/DirectEdit2002/

Great sounding synth.

Electronic music, like new age sounds great. Although aftertouch is per channel, it is enough for most of users. The Velocity is programmed, so the synth reacts to your playing as you wish.

Good Memory, programs are all the time available to your creativity.

Customer support is quite good.

GREAT SYNTH FOR ALL OF MUSICIANS, BUT ONLY WITH EXCELENT PC SOFTWARE: like: DirectEdit200 Take a look at: http://www.geocities.com/DirectEdit2002/

I really like the k-11 its an awesome keyboard.
The patches are really decent for a GM synth and with a little tweaking you can get some awsome patches...
And I didnt even need a patch editor though the screen is kinda small.
The Drum kits are incredible and extremely programmable...

for me 32 notes or sources of polyphony are just fine.
The reverbs arent as bad as people say, though there is a little noise in some of the presets.And the keys feel great nice keyboard nice design...

The sound presets are really good the strings and pianos are great.
My personal opinion is ,(Though others may disagree)is that KAWAI designed the K11 primarily for orchestral composing in mind, given the fact that it has so many microtuning scales as well as some incredible demos displaying those capabilities.However I do believe it is possible to get any kind of music out of this little killer synth.....

yes I would this little keyboard is great and I am hopeing kawai will come out with some new module or something because they makegood stuff at even better prices.....

The reps I dealt with were ok but I still believe in the company....

Ilove the k11 and g-mega because you can get so much out of these little guys.Though many people say Kawai sucks im gonna tell you I totally dissagree this keyboard suits me just fine and it has an awsome analog like filter too that can make editing your patches for techno electronic or other geres of music a joy.The k11/g-mega a 2 pieces of gear I will never part with one of the best as far as for uncanny orchestral compositions are concerned. I give them an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10 because of the price and ease of programing...

I don't use software that is specific to the K11 synth.
I use midi sequencing digital audio recording & editing software
when I record music. I use this synth as a midi controller mainly.

Keyboard action = 9. (For synth un-weighted keys).
Kawai synths have great key action.
Built-in effects: OK. 7
No expansion.
No on-board sequencer

Except for the pianos and drums, the preset sounds are bad.
I don't know what Kawai was thinking when they made this synth.
I don't know where they got the sounds. Very poor.
But I give it a 6 because the pianos are excellent.

Fantastically reliable. I bought a replacement wall-wart at Radio Shack no problem when the other one died. Display is still great.

Kawai has great tech support. They don't make synths anymore but they still employ synth tech support people. I've dealt with them and they are excellent. I own two K1's and their support for K1's is also excellent.

I would not replace this synth if I lost it.
The pianos are great. But my Yamaha sound module pianos
are great too. The synth key action is great, but I want a
weighted key controller eventually anyway.

I have two recording set-ups at two different locations.
I use this synth only as a midi controller to trigger
my other synths at my second location.
Sometimes, I'll record the piano sounds digital audio.
If you need a good midi controller - cheap - buy a K11
used. However, a K1 has the same action and feel and has
better sounds. Because of the 32 midi channels, this is a
good controller keyboard. But don't pay more than $200 for it.

I use K-11 Bank-Ed, which is a good proggy. Right, the manual is shitty.
Took me two years to understand, what a section is good for.
(It's good to play 32 single instruments at once for example Hi,Hi)
Programming is fairly easy, but only in an experimental style.

Polyphony is good enough for me, keyboard is fine. Of course it's too bad
not being able to route the channel-pressure on the cutoff or volume.

It's goos for all music I think, as long as You are willing to program
Your own sounds. Presets are plain bad.
Reverb is good, the only effect. Aftertouch only for Vibrato.

Seems to be stable, but the external power supply unit broke.

The company has abandoned to produce synths.
Probably the presetsounds were too bad. Sorry about this.

I would get me a G-Mega and buy a modern Synth with Keyboard.
It's my 1st and only one.
Greetings to all K-11 owners. Exchange sounds with me!

It tends to be on the easy side. The only problem is if you wanna go into programming, but there are 2 or 3 proggys that allow that. Sound quality depends on the patches. I like the piano, some strings, and a couple of other sounds. Bass is bad, so as the guitars! The manual, poor, doesn't teaches you mutch. If it's your first synth, it ain't gonna be easy.

32-note polyphony. Lacks at least another 32 notes. Keyboard, in my opinion, is pretty good, when compared to similar synths. I've tryed a few Roland (XP-30, XP-80)and Korg (X5), which are quite worst. No cards accepted. No more memory. No new boards. What you buy is what you get! The good thing is that it contains 2 independent midi interfaces (2 In, 2 Out, no thru). I never felt quite expressive with this keyboard, maybe because it lacks of some really decent sounds, and the 64 performances are poor. Still, if you have the patience to go into programming, you might achieve some good results on the pads and string variations... but it takes a lot of your sould and life!! Trust me! It took it from me!

As i mentioned, bass is sort kind of poor. Guitars are horrible (and that nylon one... bad!!) piano sounds fine. In fact, I enjoy it pretty much. Strings might work fine if delayed and reverbered. Effects are insufficient, only reverbs are available (6), which are acceptable (half of it). This was my first synth, and by that time, I remember I wnated to to EVERYTHING, and I do mean everything, with the machine, so I tried to go into dance, pad-piano textures, etc. It consumed me a lot of time on programming, and the results were clearly not that good, but oh well. The problem on this keyboard, is that it works fine as a *small* component to another sound sources. It can never ever be the frontline presence of a studio. Surely you'll never feel any sort kind of creation comming from a single sound, but if you're patient, use the 32-midi channeles and take good use of it with a sequencer. By the way, Midi is reliable, and didn't fail not even once. Drums perform not that good. I like some hi hats, but that's it. Generally speaking, I would recomend another synth...

Reliable, yes. Never failed before. You can trust on it. Still, if you need to use sysex for sound storage, be aware. I had LOTS of problems with it. The K-11 is a really slow machine, and I only know one program that fits into dance: Camsys - a simple dos-based software. After programming all of my patches, I've made a bank backup into a file. Later on, after deciding to make a system format, I tried to put it all on the K-11... results? Horrible! I got crazy trying to find a program that would go into agreement with the K-11 synchro speed. And even more curious, after changing my old 486 a couple of years ago, this Camsys proggy stopped responding to my Pentium. So be aware, this is a weak ponit, that I was never able to solve correctly.

Bad, bad, bad. I needed to change the entire cover, because *someone* drop alchool on it (it's pretty cool when you bought your synth 2 weeks before). It took me more than 6 months for this cover to come from Japan! Common! What kind of assistance is this? What if it was the LCD...? Or a chip?!

If something would happen to my K-11... I'd run to buy it again. Sounds strange? Not at all... just because it was my first synth, and I have about 70 compositions on it... but that's it! No further reason. Call me sentimental! :) There's no reason to buy a K-11 at the moment, unless it's a bargain, and you need a control keyboard with some good touch. Otherwise, just forget it. It's old, no really worthile sounds on it, and hard to program. Moreover, it's very hard to find patches for it(via sysex) on the net!

Pick another one!

This is a pretty simple board to operate - the most-used functions have buttons on the front panel, and editing is straightforward. The GM sounds are decent, but the performance patches are mostly quite bad; this gives incentive to program new patches to get rid of 'em. The manual is acceptable: lots of detail but strangely organized. There is a K11/GMega (rack-module version) PC patch editor on the 'net, but I have no opinion about it because it doesn't like my WinNT machine very much. (Look for "K-11 Edit" on Yahoo)

32 voice polyphony with 32 midi channels (!) 2 midi ins and outs. The built-in reverb is really awful, use outboard FX! I'm not a heavy midi user, but it talks to my PC with no problems. Midi reset on the front panel is a nice touch. The keyboard has so-so touch for this piano playing person. It has velocity and aftertouch, but I wish the aftertouch didn't affect _all_ of the notes being played. The layout is intuitive and the display is bright and easy to read from an angle. There are three banks of 128 presets: GM, "special", and user locations. There are also 64 performance patch locations that can combine up to 4 preset sounds with control over tuning, split, pan, etc. for each sound used. I like the fact that there is access to all of the parameters for every sound - resonant filters (only 3 steps of resonanace, though), ADSR, etc... you can make some strange piano sounds with this. Classically-inclined folks might be interested in the K11's tuning options. Tempering can range from the normal equal-tempered scales to some exotic pure key tunings ala Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach 2000.

I bought this board for the piano sounds which I still like, especially after editing. Keyboard touch is a problem, but maybe it's because my hands expect a piano action. Still, I think the velocity is more of an on/off proposition than it should be. This can be fixed by editing the velocity response of the filters and VCAs to suit one's playing style. The other sounds are passable without tweaking, but they need help. I get the feeling that Kawai put all their money and time into making good hardware with lots of possibilities but gave up when it came time to make the most of it in the programming phase. They might be a little hard of hearing, too. This is yet more incentive to dive into the relatively simple sound editing process. I was surprised at the bizarre analogesque sounds possible; not quite a Moog, but enough to scare small children. The brass sounds are garbage unless you are doing Tijuana Brass scores, and the strings need layering to fatten them up. I LOVE the baritone sax sound - big and honky, like when I played one... I agree with the other review about how the instruments sound in ensemble - orchestral midi files sound quite good, better than you would expect from listening to the individual sounds. This can be a good-sounding board with outboard FX and some editing.

I have pounded the hell out of it for two years (with an ashtray often sitting on it, dumping god-knows-what into the works) with zero problems.

Never had to call them.

If I lost it, I would try to find another one. It's a good board for what I paid for it, and does everything I could reasonably expect. Kawai could have done a better job on setting up presets, but at least they give you the tools to do it yourself. It definitely doesn't get in the way of making music, and it stands up to a lot of abuse.

The presets sound okay, but the real beauty of this synth is when you start to mess with the sounds. The manual is crap. It assumes you know a lot, (This was my first synth) and I was lost for a long time. I don't use a lot of patches, but the few I've made were fairly easy to make and are fairly easy to edit.

It has 32 voice polyphony. The keyboard takes a little getting used to. It has a built in reverb, which is okay, but the quality isn't the best. I can't comment on the MIDI because I don't have any other MIDI equipment.

With a fairly basic understanding of synthesis, you can really tweak this synth. I use it primarily for techno, and I really like the analogish sounds on it. In fact, in some ways, I like the analogish sounds from the K-11 better than my Juno6. With s

For the price of this little synth, the sound quality is acceptable. Edit the patches is relatively easy; but the manual is not so good.

The MIDI is very good. I'm using it for almost two years with my computers without problems.

The sound is acceptable

I had been playing Roland, Ensoniq, Casio and Kawai Synths: I had a lot of problems with all of it except with Kawai K-11

As I said before, I buyed the synth new when KAwai pull it out to the market. For this time,for this category it was one of the better keyboards...

The presets sound reasonably good, but not quite up to Sound Canvas General MIDI standards. Unlike many GM synths, you can program everything on this synth. The editting features are very ease to use. The quality of the manual, though, is poor.

The K-11 is 32 voice polyphonic and 32-channel multitimbral. It has a built-in Macintosh interface. No expansion capabilities. Built-in effects include chorus and reverb. The keys are velocity sensitive.

Some of the K-11 voices sound better in ensemble playing a GM sequence than individually (e.g., guitars, woodwinds.) It can produce some pretty good synth sounds, better than early Sound Canvas products. The reverb is kind of grainy, but can be reprogrammed to be less offensive. The keyboard is a little mushy, but you can get used to it.

The K-11 is very reliable -- no problems. I have used the K-11 on gigs both as a sound source and controller. The K-11 is very compact and portable (quite the opposite of an 88-key piano action controller!)

I have not dealt with Kawai directly

The K-11 is a good entry-level GM keyboard. It actually makes a great little MIDI controller with its "Quick MIDI" front panel control features. The built-in MAC interface and Quick MIDI features attracted me to the K-11 and did not disappoint. It is very portable -- I took it on vacation with a Powerbook and it made a great travel companion.