Show us your Kronos!!!

[adamburgess]

Some shiny lights on the shiny stand for a 5 gig run. Tonight; two on Christmas Day and two the next day...

Merry Christmas everyone!

[jeebustrain]

Some shiny lights on the shiny stand for a 5 gig run. Tonight; two on Christmas Day and two the next day...

Merry Christmas everyone!

I love those stands! The weight scares the crap out of me, though. What is your setup time?

This, I modded a Jaspers aluminum A-Frame to get this. I have memory locks and added extra wing nuts and it sets up in about 3 minutes. And it weighs 9lbs when broken down (less than 1/2 of what my Ultimate Apex stand did). I made a special front bracket out of an angle iron (attached with clips/pins) that holds the Kronos at that height. It's super stable and looks badass, IMO.

[adamburgess]

Your stand looks great. Yep, mine takes around 10/15 mins to set up. 5 mins down. All goes into a 40" drum HardCase trunk - and it weighs a lot more than yours! Dunno how much but it's about the same as the Kronos in its case. At the moment I usually only move it once or twice a week so ain't too bad, really.

Ironically, it's helped my back so much because everything's at the right height. My Spider Pro was just a couple of inches low and that started to take its toll with my playing position.

[jeebustrain]

Your stand looks great. Yep, mine takes around 10/15 mins to set up. 5 mins down. All goes into a 40" drum HardCase trunk - and it weighs a lot more than yours! Dunno how much but it's about the same as the Kronos in its case. At the moment I usually only move it once or twice a week so ain't too bad, really.

Ironically, it's helped my back so much because everything's at the right height. My Spider Pro was just a couple of inches low and that started to take its toll with my playing position.

that's great that the height is better for you. When I used my Ultimate Apex, I actually set my 2nd tier right across the top because anything lower and the kronos (on bottom) would be too low and uncomfortable. But with this stand, I actually am able to angle both boards forward and have them at the perfect angle (my arms are almost fully at rest, hanging down, when playing the Kronos). The only negative about my setup is that it's a bit cumbersome to read the Kronos display. But I don't really need to because I control all my patch changes from the iPad using SelistMaker.

[psionic311]

Jeebus, nice set up with the A-frame. I use Z-stands for the rock solid stability they give for my 88key. One 2-tier holds the 88 key and the 3rd row 61key. Another Z-stand is *inserted* backwards inside the 2-tier and provides the 2nd row for my Kronos. I angle it up so I can see the display better. They're spread out wide enough so that I can fit my MIDI foot controller and a couple pedals below.

My main question is how you use SetListMaker. I just got it and haven't fully explored it yet. I'm guessing you can use it not only for lyrics and sheet music, but also for sending out master MIDI bank/program changes? Like one press on SetListMaker could call up:

-- a specific Set List on the Kronos
-- a specific bank on the FCB1010
-- a specific program on a VoiceLive 3

How do you incorporate SLM into your live play? Also, are you mostly a drummer or keyboardist? I forget your profile from the Fusion forums. Thx

[SanderXpander]

I do this. Setlist Maker opens any sheets, chords or notes I may have and also sends out a Sysex string that switches to setlist mode, and then a bank/program select. There are 128 Setlists with 128 slots so putting in a PC message is really simple.

It's a little work to set up - you need to create a "song" inside SLM for every song you play, then you can attach all sorts of info to it, such as sheet music, metronome tempo and meter, lyrics and midi presets. You also need to create midi presets individually and attach them to a song. The benefit of this is that you can reuse your staple piano across songs without having to create a PC for each song individually.

In the "automation" settings, you can tell SLM what to do when opening a song (such as send midi presets). In the general settings, you can specify the order of data sent (raw data first, 0.4 sec pause and then the PC). Technically you don't always need to send the Sysex if you keep the Kronos in setlist mode. But I find it useful, I keep all my sounds for a specific band inside one or two setlists and no matter what mode I'm in, the Kronos will then find them. The only thing that stops it from doing so is when you're in a dialog (patch selection or yes/no etc).

There are Sysex strings for every mode by the way, so you could theoretically flip through programs and combis whichever way. The reason I stay in Setlist mode is because of SST - switching modes counts as one transition. So if I were to go from program I-A001 to combi U-C015, the initial switch to combi mode would count as SST. Selecting U-C015 via PC then mutes my program.

I hope all this is making sense, it works really well in my situation and I'm quite enthusiastic about it. If you have any specific questions about getting it to work, fire away!

[vEddY]

Yeah, I do the same thing with SLM. It's a bit of pain to set up but the good thing is - once you learn how to set it up it's really easy. Easy to set up SysEx changes (combi to prog etc.) , you can add tempo, lyrics, pointers for your playing etc. If they introduce a stable way of playing back audio tracks (preferrably in a bit of non-linear way so that you can for example jump from choruses to verses at any time) it would be a perfect app.

[psionic311]

Thanks for the tips. Couple more questions before I delve into it all:

1a) It sounds like you'll be working with Sysex quite a bit. So that means finding out for each piece of gear you'd like to control what its specific Sysex values are, right? If I recall correctly, in a complex MIDI setup, each device has its own Sysex "ID", so that it knows the following information is for itself. So if the Kronos has Sysex Y, you would send Y then you send a bunch of bank/PC commands to change on the Kronos, but then you would send Sysex X for say the VoiceLive3 so that it then would respond to its bank/PC commands, correct?

1b) It sounds like even one MIDI device could have several Sysex IDs for different modes -- like one to set the Kronos to SetList mode, another to set it to Program mode, etc. I imagine other devices have similar settings -- Looper mode for the VL3 and another for Voice mode, double tap on a BeatBuddy. Sounds like a good deal of preliminary research and documentation is needed.

2) How do you connect the iPad to your MIDI setup?

3) Can SLM itself be controlled by MIDI commands, like say from a FCB1010? I'm thinking mainly from a live perspective, where your hands are too busy to get to the screen (like sheet music or lyric page turns, triggering automated FX changes like various CX3 rotary/distortion settings)... Or is SLM not intended to be used during a song but more for pre-song setup?

I guess I'll hop over to youtube now and gets some video lessons first. One last general question, and a constant danger of mine, is at what point does the great flexibility that MIDI offers become a counterproductive cumbersome overcomplication. That answer will of course depend on the user, but any experiences you can shed are appreciated.

[psionic311]

Should've watched the videos first then came back here with specific questions they didn't answer, lol.

Question 3 above: yes, you can use an FCB1010 to control SLM. Check out 5:32 in this video, it shows how to set that up with a particular use case scenario:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8sYH-l ... CDvpQExEYL

[jeebustrain]

Thanks for the tips. Couple more questions before I delve into it all:

1a) It sounds like you'll be working with Sysex quite a bit. So that means finding out for each piece of gear you'd like to control what its specific Sysex values are, right? If I recall correctly, in a complex MIDI setup, each device has its own Sysex "ID", so that it knows the following information is for itself. So if the Kronos has Sysex Y, you would send Y then you send a bunch of bank/PC commands to change on the Kronos, but then you would send Sysex X for say the VoiceLive3 so that it then would respond to its bank/PC commands, correct?

1b) It sounds like even one MIDI device could have several Sysex IDs for different modes -- like one to set the Kronos to SetList mode, another to set it to Program mode, etc. I imagine other devices have similar settings -- Looper mode for the VL3 and another for Voice mode, double tap on a BeatBuddy. Sounds like a good deal of preliminary research and documentation is needed.

2) How do you connect the iPad to your MIDI setup?

3) Can SLM itself be controlled by MIDI commands, like say from a FCB1010? I'm thinking mainly from a live perspective, where your hands are too busy to get to the screen (like sheet music or lyric page turns, triggering automated FX changes like various CX3 rotary/distortion settings)... Or is SLM not intended to be used during a song but more for pre-song setup?

I guess I'll hop over to youtube now and gets some video lessons first. One last general question, and a constant danger of mine, is at what point does the great flexibility that MIDI offers become a counterproductive cumbersome overcomplication. That answer will of course depend on the user, but any experiences you can shed are appreciated.

Just to let you know - I don't use any sysex strings at all with SLM. I have the Kronos (actually an iConnect routing to the Kronos) set up as a midi device inside the Kronos and I just set the Program number of the setlist slot. I leave the Kronos in Set List Mode and just send 0-127 to it. When I first set it up, I used PCGTools to put set list slots of all combis I use with my band in alphabetical order. I then exported that to a spreadsheet and set up a csv file with a mapping to each song name, document name , and other info. I did a bulk import of about 75 songs into SLM and everything just worked. It took a little trial and error in order to get everything right, but once I did, it was a single import, then I copied in my documents into the app.

In order to send midi preset changes to other devices, that's what I use the iConnectMIDI4+ for. I have 8 virtual midi "devices" that I can map to anything else in my rig. While 95% of the time I just send to the Kronos and have the Kronos do the program changes everywhere (that's how I used to do it, so I didn't bother changing that because it works really well), I do use SLM to send program change information to the Roland Integra7 in my rack to switch to other Studio Sets


When I first used it, I just had the camera kit and connected it straight to the Kronos via USB. Now I use one of these, and while it took me about 3 straight evenings to figure out how the stupid thing worked, everything works pretty well now and I'm amazed at how flexible things are. I can control iPad synths (running in the background) from either of my keyboards and send midi from anything to anything (if I wanted to do that).

All of it takes a bit of patience and engineering to figure it all out, but once you do, it's smooth sailing.

[SanderXpander]

My setup is considerably less complex, I hook SLM to the K over USB and that's it. I have a NanoPad 2 but that's attached directly to the K and not influenced by SLM at all.

So I'm not sure how you would go about sending SysEx to lots of different devices. My understanding is that SysEx is just ignored without the right ID string.
And like Jeebus said, there is no real need to use SysEx if you're ok just staying in setlist mode. I just use it as kind of a fail-safe. I also initially thought I might want to switch modes and select programs and combis directly without Setlist, but as I said you then run into issues with SST.

It's important to note that the Kronos midi through does NOT send on midi received via the USB hookup. So if you want to send PCs and data to several devices hooked up to the K, you'll need to either use a standard midi/USB cable with camera kit connector to hook up the K and the iPad (so that the midi through can be used), or use a dedicated device like the iConnect Jeebus is using.

Good luck! I really enjoy being able to reorganize my setlists on the fly, during breaks or on stage, without worrying about my sheets or my sounds!

[psionic311]

After watching a number of SLM videos by the author of the app, I'm truly impressed at how flexible, easy, and invaluable it can be for organizing live sound set ups.

The iConnectMIDI4 looks very nice, but it's $200 and another piece of gear that I don't need to add to my rig. I'm trying to balance as few pieces against maximum flexibility.

Good to know that the SYSEX stuff isn't really necessary. Also crucial was knowing that the Kronos cannot send data using MIDI THRU that was received via USB. That saved a potentially frustrating couple hours trying to troubleshoot what's going on.

I think I'll end up sticking with my X-station 61 for those uses. It can route MIDI data freely between USB and the 2 MIDI OUT/THRU jacks. It's also very lightweight, can be powered by batteries, USB or a wall wart. And the keyboard action is very pleasing and faster than the Kronos keybed. Since I already own it, no extra $$$ needs to be spent, lol.

Seriously, 2014 has been the year of live and $tudio upgrades galore. I need to rein in my GAS.

[Edson Caetano]

Home Studio 2014, soon some changes

[pedro5]

Another good example of a very nice set up.

Edson Caetano.
Do you play standing or sitting ?

If sitting....what's the height from the floor to the underside of the keyboard below the Kronos ?

Thanks.


Best Wishes.

[AlexJoKeys]

I have done a search on the forums and didnt find any expected results...

Is their a safe way of backing up all programs and combis before installing system version 3.x then restoring them once the update is applied?

I have far to many custom combis and midi preset settings with other softwares to have a mess up happen during the update and loose them all.

Thanks,