Topic by feline1

  • Avatar
  • feline1
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 09-01-2008
  • Posts: 601

Topic: Korg SV1 'vintage' stage piano

Well, hot on the heels of Roland bringing out their extremely heavy and expensive piano instrument,
Korg have brought their "SV1" to market - it basically concentrates on Rhodes/Wurli/Clavinet emulations (although it has a few naffer organ, acoustic piano and mellotron sounds chucked in).

Anyone played one of these yet?
It got a very favourable review in Sound on Sound magazine...
Pianoteq's Rhody & Wurly instruments are adorable,
but for an extra couple of £grand, with this Korg you get a very playable keyboard and real knobs for controlling a bunch of vintage-style FX too.
Tempting...

Reply by Siriosys

  • Avatar
  • Siriosys
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 23-05-2010
  • Posts: 3

Re: Korg SV1 'vintage' stage piano

Hi Feline1,

Well, I can claim to proudly owning one of these........for all of 3 days now.

Call me "Shallow Hal", but I was definitely taken with the look of the instrument.   As for the sound, it's pretty damned good and considering it's a fully weighted keyboard and with knobs to boot, it's a good facsimile of the real deal at a reasonable price too.   

I'd suggest anybody who decides to get one to upgrade the software to the latest version before making too many verdicts about it and also grabbing both of  the free Sound Packs as well.  Seems that Korg are going to be evolving this unit as time goes by so it'll be interesting to see how many more sounds they can get from the wave-forms on ROM they've got.

I'd agree with you that the Wurly and Rhodes in PT are adorable.   I was using them as my electric combo until the SV-1 came along.  Now it's a bit of a hard decision as to which one I use, but live work, it's gonna be the Korg as I don't want to be carrying any computer gear around with me.

The Organs are OK, but not great and I'm not a fan of the Piano sounds as yet, but the "European Grand" is warming on me. 

I still own and use my Roland RD700SX, but as you can well imagine, they're too heavy to carry to gigs......and besides the SV-1 is like having a sexy girl on your arm (albeit one that's tryin to look a lot older than she really is).............

Reply by Jake Johnson

  • Avatar
  • Jake Johnson
  • Member
  • Offline
  • From: Atlanta
  • Registered: 04-05-2007
  • Posts: 4,491

Re: Korg SV1 'vintage' stage piano

I played one for about an hour and liked the look and feel. The acoustic pianos, to me, were decent, but nothing to write aunt Jill about.

One big  disappointment: those great knobs can't be assigned to midi cc's.

But I'd like to hear more about the sounds.

Reply by Ecaroh

  • Avatar
  • Ecaroh
  • Member
  • Offline
  • From: Finland
  • Registered: 21-06-2009
  • Posts: 452

Re: Korg SV1 'vintage' stage piano

Now when others are appraising this I wanna question few things. (Personally I haven't tried it too much so don't take my points too seriously. As vintage piano I still prefer Nord concept and at the moment I'm using Nord Piano)

But here're my concerns about SV; Prove me I'm wrong:
(They say that)
- samples are generally good but you can hear some velocity layers. (This is typical case with Korg)
- Grand pianos are maybe little weak. They maybe fade too fast. Do
they cut trough mix?
- keyboard action is slow?

Last edited by Ecaroh (23-10-2010 23:30)

Ecaroh's Website

Reply by feline1

  • Avatar
  • feline1
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 09-01-2008
  • Posts: 601

Re: Korg SV1 'vintage' stage piano

I still haven't played the Korg,
but I did play an old Fender Rhodes Stage 73 Mark II,
and seem to remember the action was pretty slow and spongey, with big floppy wooden keys...

Reply by EvilDragon

  • Avatar
  • EvilDragon
  • Member
  • Offline
  • From: Croatia
  • Registered: 27-06-2008
  • Posts: 3,972

Re: Korg SV1 'vintage' stage piano

SV1 action is the same as M50-88 and M3-88, which felt quite nice to me.

Hard work and guts!

Reply by jbondo777

  • Avatar
  • jbondo777
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 26-03-2010
  • Posts: 3

Re: Korg SV1 'vintage' stage piano

I have an SV-1, and I've got to say it works great with PTQ... love seeing the progressive sustain pedal animate onscreen!

The sounds are really great now that they've released the SV-1 sound pack 2 (i.e. now you have 3x the number of factory presets as you do slots on the board, so picking and choosing which you want to load on your SV-1 you have a lot of options), and they have a new grand that's my favorite piano preset they've made thus far by a longshot (Sound Pack 2: "Grand Piano 2B")... demo: http://www.korgpa.com/pa_root/mp3/sv1/K...g_Girl.mp3

All the stock/factory-loaded piano presets just had too immediate a cutoff/sustain dropoff to me, but this one sounds amazing.

But to be clear, the acoustic pianos were the only things that ever really bugged me. The EPs, Clavs, Organs... they all sound freaking amazing. The "incidental noise" layer (including sympathetic resonance on the acoustic pianos) they added to all these sounds really makes them so much more realistic than any other board I've ever played--I'm totally spoiled. I played one of the new Casios a few weeks ago (which I used to have), and it just sounds so inorganic and fake to me now.

Reply by Rytmenpinne

  • Avatar
  • Rytmenpinne
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 15-10-2010
  • Posts: 43

Re: Korg SV1 'vintage' stage piano

Haven't played the SV1 so I can't speak for it sounds but I own a sp250 stage piano which is supposed to have the same key action and that I like very much!

http://sharpattack.bandcamp.com/ my very own one man band project

Reply by feline1

  • Avatar
  • feline1
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 09-01-2008
  • Posts: 601

Re: Korg SV1 'vintage' stage piano

I played the SV1 in a music shop today.

The action did feel a bit "slow" compared to a piano, but seemed quite similar to me to the action of a Fender Rhodes Stage 73 that I played years ago. So I guess that's good as that is it's primary function.