Ketron Musical Instruments, Official UK Distributer

Workstations, and arranger workstations in particular, have progressed and transformed beyond all recognition over the past few years. The cutting-edge model of yesteryear that so amazed you at the time of its launch may seem rather quaint, or rather limited, by today’s standards. But while the sophistication and facilities offered in today’s keyboards seems to be increasing exponentially, the basic technology is well founded and understood. Today’s advanced arranger keyboard will offer a hefty sound engine, a MIDI file player and recorder, playback of audio, DSP effects and vocal harmonisation, while with ingenious processing of onboard instrumental samples to suit your playing style, unparalleled realism in performance can result.

However, there’s one principle that has been missing: the ability to manipulate audio data to the same degree that you can with MIDI. Essentially, when combining audio and MIDI, you’re limited in many respects to what you can do, which is play back audio data only. You can’t manipulate audio in the same way or to the same extent as MIDI, so for many parts of your arrangement you’re limited to basic sound files. However, as we shall see, all of that is about to change with the new Audya arranger keyboard from Ketron.

Italian company Ketron love to do things in their own individual way, resulting in a range of instruments which offer the most sophisticated accompaniment engines on the market, a left-field approach to different markets around the world (with dedicated modules for the Arabic and Balkan markets, and a wealth of alternative tunings and scales), and a totally original sound compared to Japanese offerings. I’ve looked at the range over the last six years with astonishment at the overall difference in approach, so when I heard about the Audya, I was intrigued. When I reviewed the SD5 a couple of years ago, I noticed the addition of audio files to accompaniments, which provided very comprehensive audio (as opposed to MIDI derived) backings, fills, riffs and counter-melodies over 16 or 32 bars, rather than the usual two- or four-bar vamps, and this fledgling implementation of audio with MIDI offered a glimpse of what was in store for the future.

While the Net was abuzz with rumours and trade gossip about when the Audya would be ready, Ketron (with typical perversity) kept putting back the date of the launch. YouTube footage shows the Audya in action at trade shows under the masterful fingers of demonstrator Robert Messier, but it was only at the start of 2009 that it finally became available to dealers. With such a ground-breaking product, it appears that the Ketron engineers wanted to get everything working faultlessly before presenting it to musos breathless with anticipation — other manufacturers please take note!

So what’s all the fuss about? Well, the Audya is the next generation of accompaniment keyboards, featuring a cutting-edge sound engine, a powerful audio multiplayer, clever auto accompaniment features and full multimedia capabilities, the most innovative of which is to play and control both audio and MIDI files within the arranger. Even more importantly, and having profound implications for the musician, the sound engine intelligently monitors your playing style and adjusts the accompaniment accordingly, even on audio material, adding real-time random changes (vamps, fills and riffs) to the style, just as live musicians would do. What is actually happening here is that the Audya’s processor is monitoring your playing style and will insert different audio tracks to suit as you play along, just as real musicians would do. On board is a library of licks and phrases for drums, bass and guitar that transform your arrangements out of all recognition, compared to standard MIDI-derived backings.

As any MIDI muso will know, guitar strums, flamenco twiddles and even fingerstyle vamps are the holy grails of sequencing; they’re the very devil to make sound authentic and accurate, and can be very time-consuming to set up. Even more importantly, these audio phrases are fully controllable and easily synchronised to MIDI tempo, and (where appropriate) can be transposed to taste with no loss of quality. Here, it’s all done for you with audio tracks, again all fully controllable and perfectly synchronised with drums and bass. With the Unplugged styles, you can enjoy the authentic and complete guitar backings, which provide the perfect tool for singing, performance and composition.

The mixer faders to the left of the display also double as organ drawbars.

This multimedia approach, first seen in fledgling form on Ketron’s own SD5 and Midjay, has been upgraded to a completely new level in the Audya, now offering up to five tracks simultaneously: dual WAVs, dual MP3s and a MIDI file, with pre-listen on headphones, and playlist and crossfade functions. You can record the results in stereo onto the hard disk. At the heart of the Audya’s sound engine are newly developed algorithms, allowing complete manipulation of WAV and MP3 material with accurate time stretching on the fly for both timing (bpm) and transposition, with barely any noticeable loss of quality. The very useful built-in MP3 encoder device allows you to sing and perform anything on the keyboard and instantly save as MP3 files to the internal 80GB HD, which can also support a huge repertoire of audio and MIDI material. Other features, such as DJ loops, special effects and CD audio tracks ripped to Wave (via USB) puts the Audya’s multiplayer in a class of its own, offering endless possibilities for live performance.

The Audya offers a massive 360MB of stereo and multi-layered sounds, with (at present) 64MB RAM for custom sounds which can be loaded while playing. A totally redesigned sampler (44kHz/16-bit) is also provided, along with a new digital drawbars section, which includes nine sliders, percussion, rotor and overdrive effects. Voicetron is Ketron’s new vocaliser, giving up to five voices simultaneously, with DSP controls for formant and pitch correction, plus EFX for new textures. Three DSPs provide new enhanced reverb, chorus, distortion, echo and rotor effects, adding individual controls per voice.

Being an arranger keyboard, there’s the usual karaoke features, and lots of storage options, with twin USB connections at the front and a USB port at the rear for connection to your PC.

The Audya is a substantially constructed instrument, with a solid metal case in brushed aluminium finish, which is roadworthy as well as good looking. The 76-note keyboard with aftertouch has a semi-weighted action, which is very responsive and comfortable to use, while the pitch and mod wheels are set a little higher than you may be used to on other keyboards. That aside, they are substantial and rubber-coated to save slippery fingers at a gig. The pitch wheel is preset to plus/minus two semitones (editable from the menu page), while the mod wheel is also labelled ‘Morphing’ for further real-time sound control. There are two USB sockets at the far left of the keyboard.

The control panel looks initially forbidding, but is laid out quite clearly in sections devoted to each part of the Audya’s capabilities. The Play Controls section provides Transposer and Octave buttons, Rotor Slow/Fast, Portamento (where appropriate), Aftertouch, Drum Set play from the keyboard (53 drum kits are on tap), bass playing modes (manual, to lowest note in a chord, and bassist, which allows free playing of bass notes for solos, among other things), split point on the keyboard, Pianist (for playing on the entire keyboard), and left voice (to select the sound for the left hand).

The mixer section has nine vertical sliders. One is for user-assignable functions, and five are for the arranger section, covering style master volume, Drum, Bass, Chord and Lower (volume of the left-hand keyboard split). The final three faders control the keyboard voices: Left, 2nd (second voice of the right split) and Right (main voice of the right split). These faders also double as organ drawbars, so each one is also labelled with the relevant footages. In the centre of the control panel is the full-colour display panel (with contrast control), which has function buttons F1 to F10 at the sides, while underneath are five user buttons plus forward and back for menu navigation. In arranger mode, the user buttons select fills and breaks.

Underneath the display is the arranger/conductor section. Buttons here select any one of three intros/endings to a style, Key Start/Stop, style variations A, B, C and D (of increasing sophistication for each chosen style, and using audio rather than MIDI-derived data), Fill in/Break buttons, Tempo slow/fast and Hold (which keeps the arrangement playing, even when not playing the keys). On the right side of the display is the Data/Value section with a continuous jog wheel and four cursor buttons, plus Menu, Edit, Exit and Save buttons, which let you navigate through lists, menus and operating modes. Below this is the transport section, comprising Start/Stop and Restart/Count In buttons.

Next up is the Styles section. There are 12 categories, covering just about everything you could imagine. Pressing a style button will reveal the first 10 styles of the genre. Using the cursor or wheel will select another page with 10 more variations, and so on. You’ll see a ‘^’ mark next to styles that use audio modelling in the arrangement. Below Styles is a section of buttons for user styles, disk management, and recording anything from MIDI files to audio data in any combination — heady stuff for the creative muso.

Finding your voice

The stereo main output jacks are augmented by four aux outs, for sending signals to alternative destinations or external processing.

The voice-select section will be instantly familiar, with instrument group buttons providing the gateway to four banks of GM sounds, which for Ketron aficionados means the usual range of standard and exotic sounds from around the world, with a lot of timbres you probably won’t find anywhere else, including their comprehensive range of accordions. The bottom row of buttons in this section selects Program, 2nd voice/preset, GM voice/user, and RAM Ins/Supersolo. This last button calls up extra sound files from the hard drive, which can be loaded into memory and stored in a variety of custom program lists to taste, and these can then be saved as a bank.

The Drawbars button turns the keyboard into a tonewheel organ, using the mixer sliders to control the footages, and you can control Leslie effects and add distortion and other effects from the menu section. The Voice List button lets you select and store 20 of your ‘greatest hits’ voices for easy recall with one button press. Key Tunes is an interesting one: with the onboard demo, you can allocate the supplied demo tracks to be played from each key of the keyboard and, using the Hold function on the demo tracks or your own collections, literally have one-finger triggering of complete songs. The last two buttons in this section provide octave doubling and automatic harmonies for the right-hand over the left-hand chords and accompaniment.

The Player section will be an entirely new concept, providing complete multimedia playing and synchronisation of a variety of material. Thus you have playback of any combination of WAVs, DJ loops, MP3s, special effects and MIDI. The Audya’s hard drive is populated with a wide range of material that you won’t have seen anywhere else, in a wide variety of musical styles: audio drum loops, fills, intros and endings, groove banks (complete percussion grooves), bass riffs galore, the ARPs and licks section (with phrases for guitar, piano, synth, strings and banjo), and live guitar recordings of suitably useful phrases. All of these — and this is the whole key to the Audya’s approach — can be added to an arrangement and manipulated to your heart’s content, including tempo adjustment without altering the pitch and vice versa. Using the mix section, you can play back up to four audio tracks and one multi-channel MIDI track all at the same time, and there’s any amount of recording possibilities for combining audio tracks and MIDI in creative ways for the complete arrangement with feel and groove.

The last section on the control panel is the Voicetron, Ketron’s own vocaliser/harmoniser, offering up to five voices with preset harmonies and styles, pitch correction, vocal effects and reverbs, and a 10-band graphic EQ. Here, the two buttons and sliders control the mic and harmony levels. Last of all is the Master volume slider with Fade Out button, which actually controls the crossfade parameters of the backing and doesn’t affect the level of the mic, to allow for on-stage chat between fades.

There’s a lot going on at the rear of the Audya. Connections comprise a headphone socket, two combo jacks (mono/XLR) for mic inputs with twin gain-adjustment wheels, stereo (L/mono) outs, four mono aux outs for anything you want in the way of monitoring and outboard effects, S/PDIF and RCA line ins (for recording more audio material onto the hard drive, among other things), sustain and volume pedal jacks, a 15-pin D sub connector for Ketron’s own FS range of foot-pedal controllers, MIDI In 1/In 2 (keyboard)/Out/Thru, a USB-type B port for PC connection, a VGA socket for external monitor, and a power switch. In short, everything you’ll ever need for communication with the outside world!

With an instrument as ground-breaking as this, where do you start? There’s such a lot to look at, and this is a powerhouse of a workstation under any circumstances. The sounds are rich and full and, to my mind, have more definition than those on the earlier SD1 Plus, which was impressive enough. With no less than 197-voice polyphony, you’ll never run out of notes and can layer those textures to Phil Spector levels with impunity. The range of sounds does a good job of being as many things to as many people as possible, and Ketron have wisely included sounds that match styles for all seasons.

The new stereo-sampled pianos and organs definitely have room to breathe, and some of the sounds with subtle effects present an almost three-dimensional quality. Suffice to say, you really have to listen to this in stereo on a gig or in a studio to appreciate all the nuances on board. As a MIDI file player, it’s second to none, but the real ace in the hole, as you would expect, are the styles with their audio complement — drums with realistic flams and grooves, guitar strums and picks to die for. And as you will see with anything more than a cursory glance at YouTube footage of the Audya in action, the whole system is very interactive and instinctive to use.

Now add the whole multimedia approach, with the range of WAVs, MP3s, special effects and DJ loops, and the Audya provides the complete package for gigging keyboard players and singers. You’ve got jingles, stings, breaks, grooves, vocal effects via the Voicetron in fact, just about everything you need on a gig (I’m just wondering, naughtily, if some enterprising TV composer might even use the audio material here for commissions!).

The operating and navigating systems are fathomable once you get used to Ketron’s quirky approach (for many, that will be part of the charm), and there’s a tremendous amount to explore. Some operations can be rather too quirky; just trying to trigger MIDI files from an external USB drive bore little relationship to what the manual suggested, but eventually, I discovered the right combination of button presses!

There is no doubt that Ketron are, at present, way ahead of the pack in arranger technology, and it would seem that the Audya has taken the normally blasé and conservative world of arranger keyboardists by storm. Being at the top of the range, it is relatively expensive (current exchange rates aren’t helping matters), but for your outlay you have a rugged keyboard with all the trimmings you expect and a whole lot more you could never think of.

The very flexibility and malleability that can be applied to both MIDI and audio in tandem opens up new vistas for truly musical and creative work. The technology premièred here is sure to trickle down into other instruments in the future, and may prove to be the benchmark for all arranger keyboards in the future. Ketron themselves aren’t resting on their laurels, and are regularly offering free downloads of OS upgrades and new sounds and styles. So, we may have had to wait a long while for the Audya, but it’s been worth it. Ketron have got it triumphantly right.

Ketron Audya

Arranger keyboard