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Throw out the old notion that Kawai can build a professional synth! This one will be sought after for a long time! For those of us who enjoy working with synths, nothing is more pleasing than firing up the K5000 and hearing a "breath of fresh air." Sounds that you wont find on your average synth...seriously.
Dont buy this guy just for its looks, or because you need some bread and butter sounds. It's a fine looking board, I'll say...but bread and butter sounds it has not. Piano, guitars, organs...poor emulations...but thats not what this puppy is designed for. Analog purists can achieve some familiar sounds with a bit of effort. What this synth shines most of all for is interesting obviously digital sounds. This synth achieves, with musical tonality, shattering glass-like timbres....dark, evolving moodscapes, and wicked leads.
You will certainly need to make use of the loaded internal effects processor (or use your favorite outboard gear) to mkae this synth fit in your mix - because it cuts through one like butter. Very cool if you need something to steal the show, but you need to tame this beast if you are using it to color a mix.
And, lastly, for those VA purists...well, this puppy has all the knobs right there for you to twist and tweak. A bit of a necessity, since programming this thing like its intended can be more like a calculus course. Maybe there is a newer OS that solves this problem - but the knobs seem to like to go to zero before it effects the sound. And also, it seems as though you need to retrigger the sound when tweaking in real time to hear the progress of your editing. It may just be me, though.
One drawback is that they held back on the wave and patch memory on this, whereas the K5000W has the full waveset. I think the K5000S is expandable to include the whole set. Kind of silly when you run out of patch space with half the numbers unassigned.
Who needs a synth like this? Well, if you are considering this to be your first synth, pass it up.
But if you have an arsenal of synths with all the bread and butter sounds and fat analog sounds you need, this synth could really change your music. It will be a unique synth in your studio thats for sure. Hell, its so much fun to play with I find myself wasting hours tweaking sounds just to see how far out a sound I can get...only to find that Ive created some monster that has no practicality at all in my music. If you can find one in good shape, jump on it. Where they were once blowing them out at Sam Ash a couple of years, they are creeping up in price as people are discovering the potential...
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