A full sound editor for the Kawai K1 by Master Layout Author Ibo Kai!!! The Kawai K1 (and K1m for desktop, and K1r rack-mountable) was released in 1988 and is still a well-loved, 16-voice polyphonic sample-based PCM synthesis. Vintage Synth Explorer says, "The K1 is one of Kawai's most economic digital synthesizers in the K-series. The K1 has 256 digital samples of waveforms, 50 of which are from acoustic instruments. You combine up to four wave shapes to create very new and unique sounds. The K1 is capable of very good acoustic recreation, excellent unique synth sounds or at times, completely noisy walls of complex sound." Lots of hurdles were overcome to create this masterpiece, including... errors in the MIDI spec. We are very lucky to have this amazing layout, and aside from how comprehensive it is... it looks great!
This is an editor for a SINGLE voice of the Kawai K1 (actually the K1r, but it should as well work fine with K1 and K1m). Since I made the Vector Control layout, I planned to make a full sound editor. But Kawai didn´t make it easy by putting some mistakes in the MIDI documentation, which I could´t figure out. So I postponed the project several times, but now finally I made it. I overcame the obstacles mostly by trial and error. Especially the Wave Select for each source was pretty hard, but that one is the most essential part of a sound. Kawai did some little tricks in the MIDI control for this and it looks like they were reluctant to reveal this to others ;-)
As the K1/m/r is a pretty simple machine, there are not many parameters for the sound itself, but quite some for the modulations (velocity, pressure, wheels etc).
Common Area
The editor, which runs in OBP mode, starts with the "Common" area to select the core settings such as total volume, no. of sources, vibrato etc. including the voice name.
Four Pages for Up to Four Sources
Following four pages provide the detail settings for each of the up to 4 sources. Please keep in mind, that if you select "2 Sources" in the "Common" page, settings in the source pages 3 and 4 will be ignored of course.
I made 2 knobs for Wave Select, as the MIDI implementation required this. The first one selects from wave 1-128, the other from 129-255. Please note that moving/changing one of the 2 knobs naturally overrides the setting of the other. The selectors for the amplitude modulation (AM, the only way to modify the sound in the K1 besides changing the waves) are copies of the according controls in the "Common" page, means they will always change together (the difference between "copy" and "make similar").
I made all controls quite big and easy to grab. However sometimes it can be useful to see and alter parameters of all 4 sources in one page, so I copied all Source controls and put them together in the "Compact" page. Here they are all pretty small, but still accessible and it is much easier to for example adjust envelopes to match each other.
As usual the only thing to be done on the K1 itself is to select a destination memory for the edited sound and perform the "Write" operation.
So have fun making noise with the K1!
If you find any bugs or have any comments, please let me know!
Cheers,
Ibo Kai
