If the X-Files were a synthesizer - Kawai K5000S
Recently, I took possession of a Kawai K5000S. After a few weeks of poking at it, I’ve got some opinions to share. The bottom line is it is one of the most unique synthesizers I’ve ever used. It sits in a place all its own, sonically. Programming it is not for the feint of heart, but there are great rewards there if you’re willing to put in the time.
Physically, the K5000S is amazing looking. It has a brushed aluminum body with a bit of blue plastic on either end plate (this was released in 1996 well before wood side panels started making a comeback on synthesizers). For It’s age, the one I received is in superb condition. All the buttons, knobs and jacks work, and it is clean. Very, very clean. I am not sure if the LCD backlight has been replaced, but its still very bright. It has that slightly washed out look which was just how displays looked at the time. A collector might want to upgrade it to an OLED (kits can be found on eBay). On the left side above the mod and pitch wheel, there is a floppy disk drive for loading/saving data (as my kid described it, that’s like a giant SD card that can’t store anything anymore and is totally useless). If I keep it, Ill replace it with a USB emulator.
On the back, you’ve got classic DIN MIDI ports (in/out/thru), and a set of 4 audio outputs (Main and Aux in stereo). It also has jacks for an expression pedal, sustain pedal and then two programmable foot switches. Thats a lot of expression, which a synth engine like this can truly use!
The last thing to mention is the keyboard. Hands down, this is one of the nicest synth key beds I’ve ever played! The keys have a little weight, but are not heavy. They do not spring or clack. The texture on the black keys is really nice. Over all, it’s a nicer keyboard than I’d expect for a keyboard of this type, though Kawai has always been known more for their digital pianos than synthesizers, so maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.
The presets are weird. There is no getting around that, and there aren’t a lot of them. On the unit I received, there were 100 presets in the A bank and 40 in the D bank. There is no B or C bank, and there is no explanation for why that is that I can see. It just is that way.
All the presets can be overwritten with your own patches, which is very useful. One thing to note, though, is that the memory is dynamically allocated. Presets with more elements will take up more space in the memory and its possible to run out of internal storage space. Kawai did make a memory expansion board for it that addressed this problem, but they are very rare. There is, apparently, someone in the Russian Federation selling clones of it on eBay, but I’ll let you decide if that’s worth the $90 risk for you.
Programming is frustrating, there is no way around saying that. You’ve got such a dizzying number of parameters buried all over the system, and the way you navigate seems to depend on where you are. To give you an idea just how many parameters there are, for each sound are 6 possible additive generators, each with 64 harmonics. Each harmonic has 8 parameters for its envelopes, not including a few for dynamic control. That’s 3072 parameters, and we haven’t even talked about the common parameters, filter or formant control. I haven’t done all the math, but that’s nearly 5000 parameters per single patch! It’s a dizzying amount of control, and it takes you a while to get to know where all the relevant parameters are. The OS, in this regard, feels somewhat unfinished, requiring you to go to sub menues and the ‘exit up’ to the main menu of common parameters in some places, while others take you to a main menu, and you drill down to the lower levels (which is a hell of a lot more logical than the reverse).
None of that would be so bad if there were some sort of macros or templates to help you. It has *none* of this. The only way to start a preset is to take one already there and modify it, and there is no ‘initialize patch’ function that I can find. If you go to an empty patch location and press edit, you will find it filled with a rather random set of values. This is what I mean when I say the OS feels unfinished. If you take a little time and create a couple blank templates for yourself, you will save yourself a great deal of time later. This synth pretty much requires it.
What makes all those headaches above worth it?: the sound. This synthesizer is bold and digital, but has a certain ‘roundness’ to it that separates it from the likes of the DX7 or other purely digital synthesizers. It’s cold, sharp and deliberate in a way that’s a 180 degree contrast to the warm and fuzzy analog that you hear everywhere these days. Somehow, though, it can also sound very organic. It’s a very H.R. Giger sort of ‘biomechanical’ instrument.
This sound is largely the result of the additive sound sources. Each patch can have up to 6 of these, with each bank being capable of either the first 64 harmonics, including the fundamental, or harmonics 65 to 128 (The higher bank is particularly good for creating metalic noise). Sources an also be set to PCM sample sources, though the S version of only has a small number of these waveforms (I’m seriously thinking of getting the W to have the expanded PCM ROM). As mentioned before, each of these banks of harmonics lets you specify a loud and soft level (modulated by velocity) and then set a loopable envelope for each. It’s an insane amount of control, that will drive you insane trying to harness.
After each source, there is a formant filter. This is essentially a 128 band graphic equalizer that you can shift in frequency bias dynamically. This is where the instruments truly insane sound capabilities come out! Like the additive banks, it has a massive number of parameters you can edit and it could take me years to fully grasp its power...but it’s worth it! Unfortunately, it’s only available with additive sources, though. I would have loved to have been able to process the PCM waves through it.
If there is a reason industrial and ambient musicians seem to love this thing, I have a feeling its the FX section. The FX are really good for the time period and they have a drastic impact on the final sound. The delays are very nice and the reverbs serviceable. No one would call them ‘natural’ sound by any stretch, but that’s far from the point of this synthesizer.
The final part I need to discuss is the standard filter section (DCF). This is the synthesizers one big disappointment. By 1996, most digital filters had started to sound pretty good and have really good resonance controls and modulation. The DCF on the Kawai series is like a throw back to the late 80s digital filters. The filter itself is more of tone control, and the resonance has only 8 possible levels. The filter tends to over drive and distort in a very uncontrollable manner and, being digital, this overdrive doesn’t sound at all warm and pleasant. Granted, for some styles, this is exactly what you want. Personally, I’ve taken to using it as a tone control and leaving the heavy lifting to the formant filter.
On the S and R versions of the K5000, there is a bank of 20 knobs intended for performance control. These are pretty cool, but also a little weird. They don’t work exactly as I’d predict in some cases (the Formant Filter bias control seems inverted, for example) but they aren’t bad. For the most part, the parameters selected are good and allow for some quick edits in performance. The user definable controls are particularly welcome.
One of the stand out items on this synth has to be the arpeggiator. It’s programmable, and you can store multiple user patches. Oddly, the pattern is not stored with the patch, which would make using this in a live context more difficult than it needs to be. It is excellent for studio use, though.
There is so much power and potential here, that I can’t help but feel that if only someone could create an additive synthesizer workstation today, with all of what we know about user experience and touch displays the story could be different. Fortunately, products like UVI Falcon, or Arturia Pigments 3.0 with have additive engines with excellent UIs. Still, they depend on levels of abstraction to make additive synthesis accessible. The K5000 series just shows you the ropes and lets you hang yourself.
With its unique sound engine, it feels like the K5000s should be a bigger piece of synth history. Instead, it’s relegated to the island of misfit synths because its just to damn hard to program. So it will remain an oddity; a evolutionary cal de sac on the tree of synth life. On the scale of ‘play it, store it, flip it’ I’d definitely say it’s at least a ‘store it’, something you’d want to keep around for when you just need something different, but not something you’re going to want to use as a primary sound source.