[Yamaha Psr S500 Styles Download [BEST]
Saija Grzegorek
I rarely start threads about boards I get, because there's usually pre-existing discussion, and I'd just as soon add to that. But even though this board has been mentioned here a bunch, I couldn't actually find a thread specifically for it, so here goes.
First, what drew me to a board like this in the first place? Picking up from my last paragraph in the post at -keyboard-for-soloduo-ceremonycocktail-hour/?do=findComment&comment=2929586 - Super-light and small boards are useful in numerous situations, including travel, casual jams, rehearsals, and gigs where circumstances prompt a rig--or a component of a rig--be as small and/or light as possible (having to move a piece between different locations during a gig for different parts of an event, needing something you can set up in 5 minutes, needing something you can play in a tiny amount of space, taking a gig that involves a substantial walking distance or spiral staircase, etc... I've had gigs with other transport limitations like having to bring everything in via a small elevator or a provided golf cart or having to hand-carry everything through a ferry ride). So I do have numerous small boards, each with different compromises. This 10-pounder seemed to have the potential to have the fewest compromises...
I was cautiously optimistic. I had liked the action of my XW-P1, though I subsequently discovered at a store that the XW-P1/XW-G1 actions could vary quite a bit, from being smooth and nice feeling to being clacky and cheap feeling. I don't know if it was manufacturing tolerances, parts sourced from different suppliers, or what. But that experience showed me that a given model could be good, but another of the same didn't have to be. Still, besides a personally good experience before, I was also encouraged by not seeing complaints of awful keys in any of the more recent Casio 61s.
So I took it out of the box and felt the keys. First impression... well, not as good as I'd hoped, but not terrible. A bit springier than I'd like, and definitely getting decidedly stiff toward the rear. But then I turned it on. Wow, it's amazing what good design/programming can do. I really enjoyed playing it. Even piano was nicely expressive for a non-hammer board... and yes, somehow, even toward the back, the keys played surprisingly well. Whatever extra resistance there was seems to somehow have been compensated for, because I was able to play it very naturally, without much fuss. (This is also true on the Kurzweil PC4-7, where it definitely gets stiffer toward the back, yet somehow remains well playable.) The Casio is far better here than, for example, the keys of the lower Rolands like the Juno DS61 or Korgs like the King Korg (even though I quite like those boards in many ways). And in fact, for piano, it plays far better than my 5x pricier Roland Fantom-07. At any price, this feels like an above average semi-weighted action. At its price, it's ridiculously good.
In just a brief eval, I'm pretty impressed. I knew it had some things I'd like from the CT-S1 demos I'd heard (since the board includes all the CT-S1 sounds), but I wasn't sure what to expect from the rest. I liked a lot of the sounds in some higher end Casios, but I didn't know if those were making it down to the lower end. But it turns out the CT-S500 has really nice sounds in pretty much all the categories. I saw very few significant gaps. There are far more expensive boards where I have more frequently had to say "I can't believe I can't find a decent such-and-such in this board" or sounds really need editing to make them usable, but on the Casio, virtually all the sounds I'd need sounded just fine right out of the box, often impressively so, and the range of sounds is thorough (more so than, say, the Yamaha CP73/88 where some not uncommon "secondary" sounds are totally absent). I'm not saying every sound is as good as what I have in higher end boards, but even the ones that aren't are still good usable sounds as is.
But of course I can still quibble. I could wish for a more dramatic, faster acting sfz brass. I'd like it to have had some mellotron strings to join the mellotron flute. Some more built-in articulations in a couple of the sounds would have been nice (but it has some really nice ones, like velocity based brass falls, doits, and shakes). And while it has a good variety of organs that may often suffice, they are still rompler organs with the attendant limitations, and I haven't figured out yet how to change Leslie speed. There are some MIDI functions I have not really looked at, and I'm hoping one could easily integrate, say, VB3m from your smartphone. But while organ may be a weak point, if you're not doing something organ-centric, there's plenty here you may at least be able to get by on, there are usable organ sounds here (though again, I'm not sure how rotary speed changing would sound).
As a bonus, there are quite a few single sounds that are, themselves, layers, so you can get a lot of the typical layered combinations you might want without even having to set them up as layers. There are also (as has been mentioned in other threads) the Advanced Tones which do various other nice tricks. AND... there's good "patch remain" where you can hold a sound, change to a new sound, and not have the old sound cut out (though you may hear a momentary effects glitch, and the old sound may take on the fx characteristics of the new), and it works even holding through multiple patch changes. More on this later.
When the CT-S1 first came out, I was tempted by the sounds/design/portability, but ultimately I didn't think I had enough use for it... too many limitations, too few times I'd likely end up using it. When the CT-S500 was announced, with all the same sounds/functions plus a lot more, I was more intrigued, but worried it would lose the appealing simplicity of the CT-S1, but really, it's still a very cleanly designed board in its operation. User interface overall is pretty straight-forward, and also somewhat customizable. You can put the 5 functions you need to access most frequently/quickly on the main screen for instant navigation to them, which is enormously helpful (and again, more on that later). It's not a deeply editable board, but the things you can alter include useful choices, largely pretty easily and logically accessed. (Though I haven't yet addressed removing an effect I don't want, which I'd like to do on one of the Electric Grand patches.)
At first, patch navigation for more than a handful of sounds looked to be so limited that I felt that, if I kept it, it would only be useful for a some portion of my potential uses for a board like this, because its ability to quickly access numerous sounds on the fly was minimal, and this is something I often need. For example, I could be playing, say, a piano sound, and decide I want to call up sax for the next part. Navigating from piano to sax isn't too bad, as scrolling goes... there are category shortcuts to get you close to the sound you're looking for. The problem is, you can't keep playing your current sound while navigating to find your next sound, because your sound will change to every sound you scroll through as you scroll! I wish there were a master setting that would allow you to navigate through the sounds, where the sound wouldn't actually take effect until you hit the Tone button after settling on the one you want, or something like that. (Kurzweil has that selectable option, for example, and Nord had it in some models, they called it Pending Load.) Right now, the only way to switch between non-adjacent sounds without the sound actually changing to every sound you pass through is to create Registrations, but that limits you to 64 total possibilities (of individual sounds and split/layered combinations), which must be chosen and set up in advance to cover whatever needs might arise, plus they cannot be named (you'd have to put a hard copy reference somewhere), and there's not really any logical way to quickly navigate them (e.g. you can't go to your sax category as you can with ordinary patch selection).
So what's the happy ending? With the system update that came out a bit over two months ago, they added two crucial things: The ability to change upper/lower/layered keyboard-playable sounds via MIDI Program Change (something I'll get back to), and the ability to select Registrations via MIDI Program Change. So (as I recently posted in the Casio forum in a thread about the firmware upgrade), for Registrations, you can use any of a number of MIDI apps (e.g. Set List Maker) to create a scrollable list of 64 Registrations with their song titles (or whatever other way you might like to describe them), configured to send the appropriate MIDI command. Place the smartphone somewhere convenient, and boom, you've got a touchscreen with a scrollable list of your 64 now named registrations. Just tap the one you want to select it. With bluetooth, you don't even have to run a cable. And in the case of Set List Maker, you can even easily re-order your 64 sounds. Your list isn't tied to presenting the Registrations in the order they are on the board... if you have a gig where you want a certain subset of them all next to each other so you can get to any of that bunch without having to scroll, you can do that, too.
But even better, you don't even need to use Registrations if you just want to change from one full-keyboard sound to another. You can leave the 64 Registration locations dedicated to your split/layer combinations, and for the single sound stuff, take advantage of the other system update enhancement I mentioned. You can change from one sound to another without having the board switch to every sound in between, by sending a Program Change to the "Upper Tone 1" channel to immediately access any sound you have created an on-screen button for on your phone/tablet. By putting your most used sounds all on the first screen, you also gain the benefit of being able to access them more quickly than you can by scrolling the internal screen, even with the built-in shortcuts to jump by category.
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