It arrived!
The Kawai K4 I bought over eBay was delivered today, and I ditched work half an hour early to pick it up from the apartment office.
It took a good hour and a half set up, including 20 minutes sweeping up the shipping popcorn that spilled all over the floor from opening the box up.
At first, I couldn’t get a peep out of it. I connected it to the second channel of my mixer, raised the gain till I got a signal, the raised the level — only to hear nothing.
I hooked it up to my bass amplifier just to make sure it was the mixer giving me problems and not the keyboard. The distorted boom that blasted out from the amplifier was evidence enough.
So I switched some instruments around and discovered it was “problem” with the channel itself. Or rather, it was user error. The first two channels of my mixer are mono inputs, and I was putting in a pair of stereo inputs on channel two. (I didn’t look closely enough to see I was plugging one of the channels into an Input/Output jack. Not sure what that does, really.)
Now I know where to plug my guitars, should I ever need to connect it to my mixer.
Once I got sound, I discovered some of the presets had been altered. I bought this keyboard because I have a lot of music that depends on some of those presets.
It took a few minutes, but years of working with this board before all came back. Navigating the LED displays felt like second nature. Still, some of the alterations were too drastic to fix manual. I had to find a way to reload the presets back into the machine.
So it took another hour of surfing and downloading and reading to come up with a solution — take a system exclusive dump of the original presets and dump it back into the keyboard. (But not without first backing up the banks already on the machine — some of those revised patches sounded pretty cool, actually.)
I had to disconnect one of my other keyboards so that my interface could use both a MIDI-In and a MIDI-Out port. I used a piece of shareware and the presets available for download by the manufacturer to load the sounds back onto the keyboard.
After that, I spent a bit of time configuring Cakewalk to speak to the new keyboard. (Note to self, which this entry really is anyway: Post the .INS file for other users to download. I found .INS files for my Korg 364 and Kurzweil PC-88, but not one for a Kawai K4.)
Now I’m all set to use some of the original timbres when reconstructing those lost songs.
Man, this is cool!
P.S. Sorry to bore you all with all this semi-technical stuff.