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[aellison62]

I have a Px5s that has a type B USB port. I have heard that Kronos can be controlled from the Px5s via usb. The Kronos has both USB A and USB B ports. Does anyone know how this connection is made? A to B? B to B? Anything on either keyboard I need to switch on or off?
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Current gear: Kurzweil Forte 7, Kurzweil PC361, Mojo 61, Korg Kronos X 61, Roland RD-88, Korg Nautilus 73

[voip]

The Kronos, via its USB A ports, can act as a host for class compliant MIDI devices. Casio indicate the Px5s is class compliant, so connecting the two should work.

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[Hector Space]

[Hector Space]

If you’re familiar with the Px5s you’ll be able to configure it to provide both midi note data and controller data on up to 4 channels (from 4 Px5s zones) at once through the usb cable to the Kronos.

The value of this is as follows:
It allows you to control layers (timbres) of a Kronos Combi directly and most importantly individually from the Px5s.

The importance of this becomes clear in the following example.
A pretty standard combi for me would be organ (CX3) played from the K2 61 keybed and Piano (SGX2), Strings(HD1) and Brass(HD1 x 3 timbres). The brass is cross faded with the piano via a foot pedal ( my right foot) controlling two compressor ifx boxes. The organ and strings are swelled using a 2nd foot pedal ( my left foot) connected to the CX3 expression and another ifx gain cell for the strings.

Note: because there is only 1 footpedal input on the Kronos (major drop off Korg!! Most other serious stage master controllers have at least 2 footpedal inputs) I have to use a MidiSolutions pedal controller to connect the second pedal. This does allow me to send footpedal controller data to the Kronos on a different channel to the timbres in the combi so it avoids the data getting confused and because of the way ifx units connect to midi data you can use a different channel to provide controller info to the ifx than the timbre channel.

I set the Kronos control panel up to provide access to the CX3 drawbars and controls.

Both footpedals are set to provide cc#4 (footpedal) not swell. This is because the Kronos doesn’t provide organ swell from the standard cc#11 expression. And if you want cross fade you’ll need to use cc#4 with negative gain on a compressor ifx.

Max polyphony: The Kronos will only stop allocating notes to a timbre when the timbre is muted and globally the Kronos is not in studio mode. If the control surface of the Kronos is set to CX3 control then you loose access to the mute buttons. The Kronos does not provide enough polyphony to play all the layered notes from the PX5s usb if I’m playing a two handed piano piece with sustain pedal, even with timbre priority set the k struggles noticeably. The Kronos isn’t smart enough to cutoff notes with zero or low output volume so it’ll continue to allocate notes to zone layers that are swelled out ( zero volume) by the foot pedal.

Ordinarily I would have used the external controller to simply dynamically mute the timbres not used (the k is set to CX3 control panel so the mutes aren’t available!). There's no external access to the Kronos combi timbre mutes via midi!!!

The solution is to use the Px5s zones to send the note data for each timbre on different channels and simply switch PX5s stages to mute the zones not needed on the PX5S.

It works perfectly!

[aellison62]

Great, thanks for the detailed info. These two boards are meant for each other!
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Current gear: Kurzweil Forte 7, Kurzweil PC361, Mojo 61, Korg Kronos X 61, Roland RD-88, Korg Nautilus 73

[Hector Space]

[Perilous]