Is the Korg Kronos Still Relevant Today?

it was the year 2011 and korg launched a game-changing workstation and they called it chronos it embodied the very definition of a keyboard workstation as it was designed to be an all-in-one solution for keyboardists of all types whether you were a producer who worked in the studio a sound designer a live musician or all of the above the core chronos was up to the task launching with nine independent sound engines a 32 track sequencer on board a fully featured sampler with multi-sampling capability the ability to layer split and play 16 sounds simultaneously a solid state hard drive with streaming and so much more the core kronos was certainly the king of the ring in terms of power however since that time there have been some modest updates but the kronos has remained largely unchanged so today is the chronos still relevant let alone king or is it a relic of yesteryear a dinosaur obsolete only fit for a museum or a collector's item for those who like to frequent memory lane we live in a tech climate that regularly characterizes merchandise a year too old as well oh the kronos is almost 10 years old but let's take a look at what it has to offer hello and welcome to another my year video in my my gear series of videos and today we're going to be talking about the core chronos and i'm so excited about this video because literally this is the workhorse of my of my studio but more so it is the workhorse of my live playing so i normally use a lot of the chronos when i'm playing live for a plethora of reasons that we'll go over if you're getting any kind of value out of videos like this or you like this video please go ahead and like and subscribe to the channel hit the bell icon so you can see uh when i upload new videos i'm always uploading new stuff let's get into it the core chronos the core chronos today is not obsolete it is not so old that it's obsolete it is long on the twos it's going on 10 years i understand that but i still believe that when you start comparing this with other keyboards the core chronos as far as the workstation is concerned is still probably the most powerful workstation on the market today um now it doesn't mean that that it doesn't mean it sounds the best so because sounds are something that are um um sounds or something that are a matter of preference um it's people's opinion uh one sound that somebody really loves somebody else really hates it but when i'm talking about power i'm talking about the actual features and things that it can handle and things that it can do and this workstation really is an all-in-one solution for keyboardist and i just want to go over some things that make this keyboard so powerful and the first thing i want to talk about today and i do want to say that this is going to be more of a talking video not um not so much a playing video if you're looking to just hear the korg if you're looking just to hear it uh you probably want to check out another video uh like on somebody else's channel that's just playing the vid that's just playing the uh court chronos there's thousands of videos of people just playing the board this is going to be very much more so informational so let's get into it the core chronos the first feature i want to talk about is the fact that it has nine independent sound engines and i know we hear that all the time and it's not just kind of um like a marketing pitch that really means a lot when we say has nine independent sound engines and what is the sound engine well the sound engine is going to give you the ability to tweak and do sound designing and whatnot using engines that are specifically tailored toward the instrument that you are trying to edit or design or tweak so sound engines are very very powerful now just to give you some sort of frame of reference the core chronos has nine independent sound engines i also own a roland rd-2000 the rd2000 has two independent sound engines it has a v-piano sound engine which has that um modeled piano uh has that modeled piano um in the vp sound engine and it's unlimited polyphony and so on and so forth and then it has their supernatural sound engine which is 128 voice polyphony and you can use these two sound engines together um and neither one of them um steal from each other's polyphony um but bottom line is two sound engines i also have a modi x the yamaha modi x or the yamaha montage they have two sound engines so that's a synthesizer um that has two sound engines it has the fmx sound engine which is fm and it also has the awm 2 sound engine which carries all the rest of their their sounds all your your brass and your your strings and your pianos and your bases and your organs and your everything drums all that stuff is all in the awm ii sound engine so there's two sound engines in the montage there's two sound engines in the rd2000 there are two sound engines or excuse me there are three sound engines in the nord stage three it has a piano sound engine an organ sound engine and a synth sound engine but those sound engines are nowhere near as complex and you cannot go as deep as far as sound design as you can in the chronos but that's three sound ninjas i can't remember how many sound engines the phantom has i think it has the zen core sound engine and the v piano sound engine and then has some sort of virtual analog i don't know if that's a separate sound engine or not but two or three sound engines in the brand new um roland phantom the the korg has nine independent sound engines so it kind of blows all of these other keyboards out of the water when it comes to sound engines and let's go ahead and look into sound engine here and so this is the sgx2 sound engine [Music] which is specifically catered towards editing piano so i can go into the sound engine here and we have some specific parameters that are specifically designed for piano so uh one thing here is you can adjust the lid i can take a lid down and immediately have a different sound just by taking the lid down or raising it up opens it up so that's just the part of the sound engine now you know traditionally when it came to pianos and stuff like that if you wanted to make edits and tweaks and so on and so forth you would adjust like adsr you know the attack uh decay sustain and release or you could uh you know do some eq'ing you add some reverb maybe a little bit of a delay in order to get the kind of piano sound that you wanted to um but now you have more with the chord corkronis you have things that are more dedicated towards the actual piano so you can take the lid up and down uh you can adjust you know hammer noise or the damper resonance the damper noise uh the mechanical noise so if i turn the mechanical noise all the way up let's see here and i hit a key you can hear when i release the key the sound of the piano making that extra noise you can even adjust the um stereo perspective and what that is is right now it is set to a player so you're hearing the piano you're hearing the piano from the perspective of being a player but you can also change that to audience [Music] and now you hear it from the audience's perspective because the audience is going to be sitting on a different side of the piano than somebody who's actually playing the piano so you can you can change it from player to audience and vice versa and then you also have something here that's called like velocity uh bias and i really like the velocity bias and what that does is it compresses uh it compresses some of the tones that you get with the velocity and it enhances other ones at the same time so let me explain it this way so when you hit a piano it's off or you hit it harder it's not just getting louder it's not just the volume that's changing of the piano but there's certain timbres and stuff are changing when you play a piano softer it has a more dark warm kind of a tone and when you hit it harder when you hit the when you hit it harder because it's a percussion instrument you hit it harder and it it really kind of gets brighter and has these different tones well you can adjust the velocity bias if i take it all the way down uh now it's going to bring out kind of the softer tones of the piano without changing the volume so what it's doing it's compressing the brighter loud tones or compressing what you would hear if you were playing at fortissimo or forte and it's enhancing the tones that come out when you're playing you know piano or pianissimo [Music] now if i take it all the way up by contrast now you get a completely different sound the keyboard is brighter but this is not done by simply changing an eq this is done by enhancing the certain um certain velocity levels and compressing the other one [Music] but not only do you have that but you also have these various samples that are included so we have like the german dark one so this is a german grand [Music] and it's dark and you can adjust all this you know the same parameters um you can come over here and let's see we can do a berlin bright so we got a variety of different samples and not only that but it has samples in here that have stretch tuning and some of the samples don't have stretch tuning and so stretch tuning is a technique that they use when they're tuning pianos uh when you get to the higher register of of the piano [Music] we get to the higher register sounds the higher notes they actually to our ear when it's when the piano is tuned perfectly to our ear the higher notes will sound flat so they're a little bit flat stretch tuning stretches the you know strings and whatnot so that you actually get so the it's actually tuned a bit higher so this uh what that does is to our ears the piano doesn't sound flat even though on a tuner it's going to say that it's you know playing the note a bit too sharp so you can choose between samples that are stretch tuned and choose between samples that are not stretch tuned uh you got your you know your japanese grands [Music] which i'm pretty sure it's probably a yamaha and of course you can do all the editing and stuff that you want to do you can just adjust the velocity bias you can adjust the release time so like this um so it's just a whole bunch of different parameters and stuff that you can adjust not only that but it has string resonance so i can turn the string resonance on and you get string resonance so if i hold a note down and hit another [Music] note you can hear the other strings inside the piano cabinet inside the piano kind of resonating off of the sound board so it gives it more of a realism when you're playing now not only does it have the sympathetic string resonance but you can dial in how much string resonance that you want you can take it all the way up and you can really hear those other strings ring out or you can take it down so that is you know just pretty subtle [Music] so you can take it down to something that's really subtle now the nord stage 3 also has string resonance but it's either on or off you can't really adjust the level of string magnets resonance um that you have my rd 2000 it also has string resonance as well uh but it's not quite as dynamic where you have all the various strings and stuff resonating out depending on which notes and stuff that you're hitting and holding down and so on and so forth it's not quite uh it's not quite that dynamic because it doesn't have the processors processors and stuff inside to do that [Music] um so i can come out here let's see one more thing let's go to i'm gonna come here and i'm going to pick a berlin grand i'll just do this one so this is a berlin in the berlin grand they have um unicorda or soft petal [Music] samples so once again it just adds to the realism by having uh unicorda soft pedal so [Music] so a lot of times people come up to something like this like a chord chronos or something and they you know we'll pick a preset and play it and they'll decide basically whether or not they like the sounds of the piano in the chronos just by playing a preset but there's so many things that you can do to edit this sound because it's it has its own dedicated sound engine um you really got to kind of play with things and tweak things and get in there and design things to get it to be to your liking and not every single piano in here um is going to suit um every single um scenario so when i'm playing live i actually turn all of this the damper resonance and all that stuff i turn it all off because i don't want to have extra noise in the mix now if i'm going to use a piano out of the chord chronos and some sort of recording or something like that and people are going to be actually listening to it with earbuds and stuff like that that's when i'll turn on more of those things maybe if i'm going for more intimate sound or something like that i might come over here and bring down the lid and let's see uh let's pick uh we'll do a german dark bring the lid down bring the velocity bias down and you know we'll just turn this stuff on i'm just kind of making this up as i go so you can make edits really really quickly save it and then you have it so a powerful powerful sound engine but that's just one of the sound engines if i come over here and go to an electric piano [Music] now if i go into the program mode you have a completely different interface because now i'm in the ep1 sound engine which is specifically designed for electric pianos you know like roads whirly stuff like that specifically tines like pianos and reed based electric pianos and these are completely modeled so i can come over here and i can address the um treble i can adjust the bass take the bass level up and down [Music] um i have a i can turn on my vibrato i can adjust the intensity of the vibrato i can adjust the speed of the vibrato [Music] so i can do all of these uh various adjustments just as if i was like playing an electric piano so that's what it has uh it has a cabinet excuse me it has an amp simulator here i can turn it on or off by default on this one it was on i can turn up the drive [Music] um so i can turn up driving turn it on turn it off and then i also have these insert effects over here so i can choose like a phaser [Music] turn down some of this drive [Music] so i can choose a phaser you know we can go over here we can choose a different one let's see [Music] that's a different phaser um a vintage chorus [Music] black chorus so you have these different insert effects just like you would a real um like a real rhodes where you could plug in like a guitar pedal and have your effects pedal [Music] and have your different uh different effects and actually you're not just stuck with you know just the way it sounds that's a compressor [Music] but you can actually adjust your you know here's my phase but i can come down here and i can adjust [Music] i can adjust the effect here so i have different parameters and stuff that i can adjust on every single one of them and that's the ep-1 sound engine i can go to another sound engine this is the cx-3 sound engine if i go into the program mode and then click on the thing here you get [Music] a totally different interface because now this is designed for you know playing organs and so i got my draw bars using my sliders and i can adjust all of my you know all of my rotary effects so here's my rotary i can take the right now it's making some noise i could take the noise level down to zero or take it up to 99 and hear a lot of noise so it gives you all of those different parameters i can adjust the leakage level so you can hear the leakage i can adjust the click the click on click off so i hit the click hit a note let's turn down some of this noise and leakage so you can either click so you can hear the context like the contacts are a little dirty that's what happens in an organ in a real hammond the contacts become a little dirty and you get that click sound so you can you have a click on and you have a click off so when you lift when you lift when you come off the note you hear the click and you can adjust this so when you hit the note you have that click noise because no two organs if you're playing an actual organ like a hammond organ or something those two organs are going to sound exactly the same because they age and they wear and stuff differently you know but you have your you have your vintage sound and you have your your bright sound you can do the classic cx3 you can do a custom one but anyway lots and lots of stuff here um to do as far as the organ is concerned it's its own um it's its own separate sound engine so i can come over here i can split the keyboard [Music] so now that i have now i have two two registers you know for my uh for my organ you know i can use [Music] so that's the cx3 sound engine so this is a completely different sound engine and you have a completely different interface rather than just having just the generic the adsr and some reverb and some you know stuff like that you specifically can design your sounds using basically like a plug-in that is specifically tailored towards what you're trying to do that is very very very powerful um let's go back to my so let's hear this [Music] now believe it or not this is what's called the str1 sound engine is actually a string sound engine uh that developed that sound it's a the star one is designed for like strings like you know plucks and and um strums and getting fret noise and so on and so forth but the uh sound engine is so diverse that you can actually set it up where you get sounds like that and of course once again you have a completely different interface when you're trying to edit these things and so we got you know all these different you know string main um dampening dispersion string pitch pickups and feedback you know so it's all designed with strings you know in mind doing strings and plucking and stuff like that you have nine of these sound engines so this is very very very powerful and you can get into deep sound design and just kind of develop the sounds and stuff that you want now something else i want to talk about that's very practical about this here let's go back to my isn't she wonderful isn't she precious less than one minute i never thought through love we'd be making one as lovely as she but isn't she lovely made all right so let's go here now [Music] now we talked about this already um but let's go some of my ep one i can choose different i'll take a read this mother mother there's too many of you crying brother brother [Music] so um take a look at this here going here so let's say i want a phaser effect and i'm going to take up my drive a little bit here [Music] okay so i took up the drive took up the phaser not took up the phaser but added the phaser so i just want to show you something really quickly here so i can come into let's see come in let's see come into my all of my effects so these are my effects now the core chronos you can you can layer up to 16 sounds together um and have them play all simultaneously from the keyboard itself uh but uh with those 16 sounds you get 12 insert effects over those 16 sounds or whenever you're in program mode if you're just using the regular program like this one is regular program i have 16 insert effects that i can add to this to this sound but right now i actually have all of the insert effects they're actually all off none of them are on and what you are hearing is the actual [Music] the sound engine itself so if i want to add a phaser i can add phasor effects and adjust phasor effects or whatever or chorus if i want to do course i can do it from here i don't actually have to go into my insert effects and add chorus to my sound what that does is it frees up my insert effects and i can use them with other sounds or use them for other things so that really shows the power of the chronos now in other keyboards you know you'll have a electric piano and it'll be dry and if you want to add you know a phaser to it you've got to go into your insert effects and add a phaser if you want to add you know some sort of samp amp simulation overdrive you have to go into your you have to go into the parameters you have to go into your insert effects and you add it so i'll give you an example so like the um the montage um if you're going to add you get two insert effects per part so you can have 16 parts simultaneously you get two insert effects per part if you want overdrive on one of your parts you add the overdrive to that part that you have to use an insert effect if then you want tremolo then you have to add tremolo using an insert effect if you want vibrato you're going to use an insert effect well you only get two so you can only use you know hey maybe you want chorus and tremolo or something but then you're not going to be able to do overdrive or the amp simulator the way you want to you see so you only get two insert effects per part of course lots of different workarounds and so on and so forth that keyboard is an absolute beast but what i'm saying is with the core chronos i'm not using any insert effects to get that sound it's all contained [Music] in the sound engine itself and that comes in handy when you are layering sounds because you are able to um you are able to reserve or save your your resources you know you don't have to use all of your resources and use all of your insert effects just to beef up your electric piano sound so you don't have to be using some of your insert effects for your electric piano sound but you can use these for you know if you got a saxophone or something playing along with it or you have drums or you have bass and different things and stuff like that then you have these insert effects available to be specifically tailored towards those instruments and this doesn't need you don't need to use a lot of the insert effects because it's already baked into the sound so to speak i remember one of my first keyboards uh i can't remember how many insert effects it had but it was like this you know just a yamaha psr something or other um and i remember i would add a rotary effect and then that rotary effect would be on my drums it would be on my base it would be on my piano it would be and it's like oh man you know i can't you know if i add this effect it's going to be on everything and so you had to be uh you i think you only got two insert effects for the entire for the entire sequence so uh so you got 16 channels but you only got two insert effects so you had to use it wisely you want to add reverb all of them had to have reverb and they're all going to have the same reverb if you wanted to have the rotary effects then you know uh you had to use it wisely so anyway uh but with this it's very very powerful because you get 12 insert effects but it's more than just 12 insert effects because with in combination with the sound engines you actually have effects that you can use that are at your disposal and they don't take away from your actual insert effects so it makes your sound bigger fatter and so on and so forth so that is another powerful thing so let's go quickly here i want to go to my so this is back to the sgx2 sound engine let's go to my program here and whenever i'm using um anything but the hd1 sound engine but any of the other any of the other sound engines um where i want to go here we go um is that where we're going to go no give me one second here where am i going oh man there we go boom so [Music] so if i'm not using so if i'm not using the hd1 sound engine any other sound engine in here so the other eight i can combine two of them together in one program two sound engines together in one program so right now this is a piano but i can come over here and i can add another sound engine so i will add the mod 7 sound engine [Music] so this is an fm sound engine with six operators so on and so forth but not gonna go all into that but now we essentially you have two sound engines playing at one time in one program all right i could change it to probably six it goes to the polysix sound engine and so this is my poly6 sound engine [Music] again has its own interface different brands and stuff you can adjust put them together so these both of these sounds are together you got a piano acoustic piano and the um the poly6 ex sound engine together but it's all in one program so why is that important what's what's the big deal okay let me show you something here so we just go into a combination that i have [Music] now in a combination you can have 16 different programs in a combination 16 different programs and one combination the thing about having 16 different programs and one combination is [Music] this sound [Music] even though it has a poly 6 sound and a grand piano sound from the sg x2 sound engine when you're in combination mode if i was put in combination it would count as one channel one channel you will get both of those sounds together so that is so powerful because of the layers and stuff that you can put together now i want to explain something about the the yamaha montage or the modi x now i explained this in another video and i'll explain it here if you are using like for instance the cfx grand in the in the montage that takes up four parts yes you can play 16 parts you can you can have 16 parts layered split so on and so forth uh when it comes to the modi x you can have 16 parts but if you have that cfx grand that actually takes up four parts you have to find another piano that only takes up a single part if you actually want to get a full 16 sounds or a full 16 parts so if you use the cfx grand as one of your parts that's going to leave you with you know 12 um more parts that you can add now with the cfx now excuse me with the modi x uh you can only play eight parts from the actual keyboard the rest would be have to be triggered from an external source so if i took the cfx grand in the montage or the modi x and then i wanted to layer other things with it and i wanted to play them all from the keyboard itself the cfx command is going to eat up four parts and it's going to leave me with only four other sounds i can layer with it there are some sounds in the montage and in the modi x that take up all eight parts so you have one sound takes up all eight parts and so you can't layer anything else with it and play it from the keyboard because that one sound takes up eight parts uh but with the core chronos you truly can have 16 different sounds so this would only count as one it doesn't count as two or three or four or five or six or seven or eight so sometimes when you're looking at specs you say hey with the core chronos you can have 16 parts simultaneously the montage can have 16 parts simultaneously they're the same no they are not the same they're not the same because you can play all 16 parts from the keyboard itself with the montage you have to play you can play eight parts from the keyboard itself also with the montage there are multi-part samples in the montage and they are a single part samples so you may have a particular piano that you want to layer with other things and that piano takes up more parts or you can have an electric piano that maybe takes up five parts which leaves you with only three other instruments that you can layer and split and stuff like that with it so that's something to pay attention to but when it comes to the core chronos you don't really have that issue [Music] so let me go into my combination here that's another thing that i really like about the core chronos is that i can put these 16 parts together and i can control the various volumes and stuff with sliders so this is a a um this is a combination that i often use when i'm playing in church um specifically i'm normally not playing when i play in church i normally always use layers there's a piano layer here there's the ep [Music] there's another layer here it's pad [Music] all right so we got my pad there got a string [Music] [Music] and i can play with them all together [Music] another thing i really like about the chord chronos is it has a dynamic um has a dynamic um polyphony so the dynamic polyphony when i say it has a dynamic polyphony it will literally um adjust the polyphony on the fly so that you cannot hear notes if notes drop out it will steal from one sound engine to supply another sound engine basically it gives you the notes where you need them and there's different parameters that you can set into place where you can tell it which instruments or sounds or whatever that you want to have um polyphony priority so that's a acoustic piano that's an electric piano that's a pad and that's a string and [Music] and those are playing you know full cords using a sustain pedal and you're not really hearing any dropouts because of the dynamic polyphony and so it's very rare for me when i'm playing this even if i have a lot of sounds stacked together it's very rare that i'm actually getting any kind of um note dropouts at least audible ones uh that i can hear because the chronos is so smart um i tried the same thing with the modi x didn't have the same result i you know put some pads together and put some pianos and stuff together and it was cutting out like crazy of course lots of different workarounds and different things you can do you can pick various single part pianos and you know all kinds of stuff you can do again i'm going to go over that keyboard in another video that keyboard is a beast but it is not as powerful as the [Music] kronos all right so while i'm talking about combinations here let me go into my set list and the setlist is what i've been using to to go over all of our sounds here [Music] so uh let's go to my different set list let's see here um so now i'm using another set list the setlist is also one of my favorite features especially for playing live because i can organize all of my sounds all my combinations and stuff get them ready for a song for a set for a show for whatever i can all have them in here and i can just literally click the screen when it's time to go to the next song and uh this is a dynamic set list um more dynamic than so again i'll compare it to the modi x to the montage that has a setlist function and stuff as well or you can just click you know what they're called the live sense i believe but with the core chronos you can actually color code your your various your various boxes so just kind of at a glance things can be organized so maybe you can have all your fast songs or something like that or going to be you know red or maybe all of your um things that contain sequences or something like that like you're going to use a sequencer with it you can you know color code it basically you can color code it however you want to whatever is going to help you and give you reminders you can also add notes and stuff like that so i can add notes like progressions or like chord progressions and stuff in there right on the screen my chord progression is there or you know add notes like hey after the bridge go here or there whatever you know just little reminders and stuff for that i can put it right on the screen that's very very dynamic and i always use the setlist when i'm performing live in fact the setlist is probably one of the main things that keeps me coming back to this keyboard in order to play live because i can i can actually i can actually see everything on the screen and what you know what i'm trying to do so um for instance let's see here um let's just click on something um there we go so this is you know something that i actually use and i already have a drum track set up because sometimes i don't actually have a drummer when i'm playing in church oftentimes i'm a one-man band depending on where i'm playing i could be going to a different church that's not my church and playing and singing and so on and so forth there's no drama and stuff there and i literally will use the drum track [Music] so it's already set up and ready to go um i didn't have to actually do anything uh here's another one [Music] [Applause] [Music] so it's already set up they're ready to go and i put the songs in there and all i have to do is click and i'm ready to go ready to play everything is set all the volume levels everything that i want drama track everything it's all in there and all i have to do is click on it it makes performing very very easy so i'm not actually focusing on my gear when it's time to actually perform and do something i'm actually focused on the actual performance um engaging the crowd things like that setlist makes that super easy and then because i can see all the different you know all the different sounds and things and stuff that i have set up because i can see it and the way it's set up and i can color code things and whatnot you know if something gets changed in a set like i'm in a band as well sometimes the band leader he'll call hey we're going to do this song instead of another song that we're going to do and they'll do it right on stage you know they'll say okay let's scratch the song we were going to do let's you know let's do another song instead and then i can just click on okay great and i'm ready to go for that song i don't have to you know hit a whole bunch of buttons and do a whole bunch of different things whatever i can literally have all the songs that we have i can have you know maybe you know 60 songs you know ready to go and all i have to do is just you know click couple times boom and and then and then you're you know you're off to the races so the set list really makes things it really makes things very very easy and then i have all of my uh my sounds and stuff set up here and i can use my sliders and whatnot [Music] to [Music] so that one has a horn horn sound but again it's all ready you know it's all ready to go and i have the core chronos set up to where whenever i mute because i can use the buttons to mute certain sounds and i have a setup to where when a sound is muted it is not taking up polyphony so i can reserve reserve my polyphony by muting certain channels that are not going to be used so you know something like this is set up let's see here [Music] do [Music] do but anyway it's already set up ready to go all i have to do is hit a button and um off to the races so with a little bit of pre-planning you're ready to go so i love the setlist function now uh another thing i like about the chronos is the fact that it has the um usb um connections in the back i can connect a controller or anything that's um usb compliant plug it right in it'll power it so if i'm using my arturia key lab 49 keyboard to play certain sounds and stuff from the chronos all i have to do is plug it in and it powers it it's it's ready to go so um anything like that usb stuff you can plug in your usbs you know save it memory sticks flash drives all that kind of stuff external hard drives it actually comes this comes with a 60 60 gigabyte ssd um um hard drive to store your samples and so on and so forth so uh you're pretty much not gonna really run out of space if you do run out of space it has a slot already ready to go where you can add your own ssd whatever size you want you can add a terabyte and and put it in there and you will have that inside of the core chronos these are things that you don't have uh with other hardware uh workstations um it has a full blown uh sequencer 16 16 tracks 16 midi tracks and 16 audio tracks as well so it's actually a 32 track sequencer as i said in the intro um has a full sampler so i can bring in samples i sometimes will bring in samples from like my complete um complete 11 collection or complete 12 whatever it is that i have now basically vsts and stuff you can sample them bring them in here and play them take them with you and then of course uh so you have your sampler you have your full-blown sequencer and then you have your program mode you have your combination mode or whatever disc whatever so lots and lots of features um when i look at things like the um the roland phantom it looks great i love the hardware and so on and so forth i'm you know definitely eyeing it from afar um but it doesn't have a of like a full-blown sequencer it has a a pattern-based sequencer but if you want to do linear recording and you don't want it to be pattern based you can't really do that yet you know they talking about maybe some upgrades upgrades and stuff coming later we have to wait and see what those are but as of today as the date of this video it doesn't have any kind of linear recording you cannot record audio tracks you can only record midi tracks i also hear that it's pretty you get minimal you get minimal effects it's like insert effects i think it may be like two insert effects per um per scene or something like that uh don't quote me on that but there's less insert effects than the core chronos or not really the montage as well but don't quote me on that one i don't have a phantom but i'm just saying like you know like the sampling and the phantom it doesn't have a full blown sampler so you can't do like multi-sampling and so on and so forth like you can on the chronos where you can take sounds and then lay them across the keys and so on and so forth so i'm talking about specifically the power of the chronos versus other you know versus other instruments um and of course you have the montage the montage is more of a synthesizer and they added a sequencer and stuff to it but it's not really a workstation so it doesn't have a full-blown sampler it doesn't have a full-blown sequencer but that that that instrument is very powerful again i keep saying that but when it comes to comparing it to the core chronos when you are really actually comparing what the instruments can do nine sound engines versus two uh or three um a full-blown sequencer with audio in midi versus a pattern sequencer with just midi or uh you know just a pattern uh sequencer um without all the full-blown editing capabilities and so on and so forth like the core chronos really is an all-in-one solution and having those nine sound engines and and just having so many things at your disposal whether you're a sound designer or whether you play live whether you are working in the studio with people if this is going to be your only keyboard if you want to sing and put your voice into it use a vocoder you are going to have a hard time finding things that the core kronos can't do and in this day and age where people are using a lot of using computers for a lot of the things that they do which i do as well i use ableton live i have vsts so on and so forth but when i want to use hardware when i want to get an idea down quickly i want to hurry and record something i click on my core chronos and i get going [Music] so i'm laying out an idea really quickly sometimes i don't want to fire up my computer i will pick up the core chronos and i will get everything you know put in here get my id and stuff down or whatever but you can plug your guitar into it and then you can have your effects from the core chronos you know with your guitar and all that kind of stuff anyway it just does so many different things but from a practical standpoint of you when i'm playing with this live that setlist function really comes in handy the drum track really comes in handy now when i'm really gonna do stuff i actually have an akai npc nikaian pc1 and i load all my tracks and stuff in there and that's how i actually use tracks you know when i'm actually prepared and i'm ready to go that's what i use to you know trigger samples trigger tracks and stuff like that and play you know through the different tracks and stuff i don't really use the drum tracks and stuff in here anymore like i used to but um but they're there if you need them you know but there's so many different things that this keyboard can do now it is not the easiest keyboard to use it can be hard uh it can't be difficult it's a very very steep learning curve the manual the actual full manual was over 1100 pages yes i have read all 1100 pages and i have forgotten almost everything that i've that i've read and have to refer back to it and try to remember how do i do that again and so on and so forth but it is a powerful powerful board and if you are in the market for a workstation or in the market for a keyboard you definitely want to take a look at the core chronos because it might just fit the bill don't let the fact that it's almost 10 years old turn you off or the fact that other things have come out after it because i still believe today that this is probably the most powerful workstation on the market today hope you enjoyed the video thank you for sticking with me this long if you have and don't forget to like and subscribe if you're getting any kind of value out of these videos peace

Channel: Darrick Keels

Views: 58,839

Rating: 4.8835893 out of 5

Keywords: korg kronos, korg kronos review, korg kronos demo, korg kronos workstation, korg kronos sounds

Id: z2JczLMfAiU

Length: 57min 49sec (3469 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020