Product: Kawai K3m
Price Paid: US $200 used
Submitted
09/03/1996
at
10:17am
by
Art Leonard
Ease of Use
:
4
The presets are mediocre at best for today's needs, but building your own is very easy, once you've managed to figure out the display. A patch editor is not available (as far as I'm aware of). There are relatively few parameters, but those few ones still give you a broad pallette to work from.
Features
:
2
Poly: 6 notes. No keyboard - tone module Chorus effects built in. 3 types. Best when used in bi-waveform mode with a detuning on the waves. Accepts 1 RAM cartridge, looks like an Atari cartridge. Velocity and AT - quite good... has a fast logarithmic taper at the high end of the velocity map. No onboard sequencer. Everything is easy to use, but not very versatile.
Expressiveness/Sounds
:
6
None of the instruments sound realistic. They are an early form of wavetable. What you DO get is a pallette of warm, analog sounding pads and comps, good for dance and progressive rock. The organ sounds can be tweaked quite well for an old synth. Very analog sounding for a "digital" synth from that era. Not too bad for expression. You can get quite a bit out of the AT.
Reliability
:
6
Um... I tried to use it in a gig without a backup, and it went. I've had some power supplu problems, but beyond that, it has been very reliable since I bought it several years ago.
Customer Support
:
No Opinion
I have never dealt directly with Kawai
Overall Rating
:
6
I think it's the best sounding synth in my rig. Mind you non of my synths date post 1988 (much to my dismay). The outputs are fairly clean for a unit like this, though I'd clean it up in a studio. It's a good warm synth that (not by default) has some very nice, full pad sounds in it.
