Last night my duo The Innocent Bystanders performed for a third time at Lympne Castle in Kent. Its a truly spectacular 13th century Grade 1 listed building. It has incredible views across Romney Marshes, which apparently inspired Paul McCartney to record an album there in 1979 (I would have been just 1 at the time but some 34 years on, the beauty and inspiring surroundings are not lost on me!).

Our performance was a surprise for the bride which is quite unusual. Normally the bride will be the one very much in charge of booking a band/duo, but the chap who booked us wanted to surprise his new wife with a romantic gesture to sing the first dance - Always by Bon Jovi. This isn't a number we'd normally do, so we had to rehearse it beforehand especially for the booking. We set up in The Great Hall, and worked alongside the DJ who was very considerate and allowed us to set up in his normal area so we could clear our gear at the end of the booking when he took over to play music into the early hours of Wednesday morning.

As always, the staff at Lympne Castle were helpful and everything seemed to be run very smoothly. We're hoping to be booked back there again soon as its such a lovely venue to play! Thank you to Matthew and Rosie, we wish you both a very happy future together!

A few weeks ago I took delivery of my new Korg Krome 61 Keyboard. I was a little apprehensive before ordering as a couple of years ago I had ordered a Korg TR61 and the keys had very sharp edges. The thought of losing a finger half way through a glissando meant after a little soul searching I decided to return it! When the Krome arrived I was happy to find that whilst its not perfect the build quality was much better than the terrible TR!

Until now I had been using an old Korg N5 which was starting to struggle after 12 years of gigging around Kent and London. The pitch bend wheel had been knocked a few times which meant I had to carefully tune it up before each booking like a guitarist tunes a guitar! The aftertouch had also stopped working and the buttons all needed a hard press each time they were used which was problematic when I needed to change a sound quickly half way through a song. So this was a much needed upgrade!

My Criteria

There were a few things I had on my criteria whilst researching. Firstly, it needed to be a similar size and weight to the N5 (under 10kg) as I didn't want to be lugging around a huge keyboard to gigs along with my saxophones and PA system. Secondly, the piano, electric piano, strings and organ sounds had to be good. Lastly, the keybed and build quality had to be of a reasonable quality, feel nice to play and hold up to many more years on the road.

Korg Krome Build Quality

Korg N5 (left) and Krome (right)

My first impressions were very positive. The quality looked good, with nicer polymer plastics used and an aluminium fascia surrounding the top panel. The joystick (replacing the pitch bend wheel for real time modulation and pitch bend adjustments) felt nice and solid and is coated in a rubber feel plastic, which makes it feel more comfortable to use. Some might say it has a plain design but I quite like this understated look. I also have to mention the weight. At 7kg its fantastic for transporting to and from gigs and carrying up flights of stairs, especially if like me you have several instruments to transport and a PA system!

Unfortunately, the power button is not very solid. It feels slightly loose and moves about up and down, left and right by a millimetre or so in each direction. It has no "click" to indicate you have pushed it on or off which feels a bit disconcerting. I checked with Korg that this was normal and they said yes. My old N5 had a larger button that stayed in when the power was on, and stayed out when it was off - you know, like most power buttons!

The Krome uses an external power supply with a small DC power socket. It would be much nicer to have a standard IEC lead input but I guess they have to cut costs somewhere. The power brick is small and light, but the power socket where the adaptor plugs into the keyboard feels a little fragile and wobbles about in the socket. I imagine I will have to be very careful with it longer term as it feels much less sturdy than the one on my N5.

It always confuses me when manufacturers design and build a new product so well using nice quality materials and then they use a very flimsy power connector. I had the same problem with a Soundcraft Spirit FX8 mixing desk. The whole unit was made out of 1.5mm steel, it was built like a tank, but the power socket was very flimsy plastic! I'd love to meet the people in charge of making these decisions and ask them what they were thinking. I'd wager that they're not gigging musicians using the equipment day in and day out!

Krome Connections

On the back there's two stereo L/R unbalanced jack outputs, along with jacks inputs for damper, switch and pedal plus midi in/out connectors. There's also an SD card slot to import and save song data to and a B-type USB port so you can use the Krome editor to edit sounds on your computer, or use the Krome as a controller.

TouchView Screen

The large seven inch TouchView screen dominates the front panel. It seems to be resistive rather than capacitive but its still very responsive and easy to use, plus it has a generous 800 x 480 pixel resolution, so its easy on the eyes. Its very intuitive and everything seems to be in the right place. The default brightness setting was too high for me, especially for evening gigs so I turned it down from 10 to 3 and found that to be just right. You have to save this in Global settings for it to remember after you have turned it off, otherwise it reverts back to the default setting.

Krome Sounds

The sounds are light years ahead of my old N5. The N5's sounds totalled 12Mb, and the Krome has 4Gb (so 4096Mb)! Of course ROM isn't the only factor in creating beautiful sounds, but having that amount of freedom does mean that the Krome is able to have piano samples that are not looped, and can be sampled at 8 different velocities for each note. On my N5 the samples were looped, and one sample might cover up to 5 or 6 notes, the Krome has a sample for each note. 2.8Gb of the ROM is dedicated to the piano sounds, and you can hear some of this depth in the intro of the demo below:

The Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer patches also sound great, and the same can be said for the strings and organ sounds. Each sound has a drum track, and this can be changed to different patterns and adjusted via the tempo knob on the right. Essentially this is like a built in drum machine, although there's no option for fills or ending as you might find on an arranger keyboard. Its a nice feature and I'm sure it will come in useful in live situations when we play songs acoustically without backing tracks. There is also an arpeggiator for each sound which would also be useful, especially for people who want to do sequencing.

Feel, Responsiveness & Playability

The Krome is available in 61, 73, and 88 key versions, all without aftertouch. The 88 version has a different keybed to the 61 & 73, so I can't comment on that. On the 61 key version the keys have metal underneath each one to give them some weight, so it seems quite promising, but they are acoustically quite noisy and a little creaky as they are pressed.

They do have some slightly sharp edges on the near side (although this is nowhere near as bad as on the horrible TR keybed). My N5 has much nicer keys, which are smooth and rounded. Plus they're quiet and feel more natural and responsive to play. The omission of aftertouch is missed too, since it is useful for adding modulation on organ and strings sounds without taking your left hand off the keyboard.The keybed is not a deal breaker for me, as the other features make this a great keyboard for the price, but I wish Korg would offer a keyboard with all the features of the Krome and retain its light weight whilst adding a high quality keybed with aftertouch. You might say, at this price point (£799) it is to be expected, but I still think its something that is surely very important to the majority of musicians especially as this is marketed as a professional keyboard.

Midi Files & Sequencing on the Krome

Within any patch you can press record and the system will ask you if you want to automatically set up the current sounds for recording in the sequencer. This is a really handy feature as it allows you to move all your combination data, program data and effects into the sequencer quickly without having to manually enter it. For me that's where the ease of use ended unfortunately. Although the sequencer on the Korg is ahead of those found in similar workstations, I still found it quite clunky and hard to get to grips with. This isn't a fault with the Krome as such; its more a limitation of trying to work with a 7" screen in a world where we have been spoilt by using computers with mouse, keyboard and 20"-27" screens for sequencing. If you've ever tried to edit a video on an iPad you'll know what I mean, its just not very easy to achieve!

Back when I first started learning to play the keyboard the Krome's sequencer would have been amazing. However, in 2013 it does seem to be a painfully slow experience. For example, changing a sound for a track on a midi file on a normal computer would involve a couple of mouse clicks. With the Krome you need to go to that track, go to Edit Track, then the Event Edit page, select the events you want to view and untick everything except "Program Changes" and then just as you find the event that you need to change you have to remember which patch you want to change it to as its done using the program number not the name! Nine times out of ten I would forget the number of the patch and have to come out and start all over again. You need to do this for each track of course so it gets old fast. Perhaps its just me, but I found it to be quite tedious and slow when you are used to working with modern computer based sequencer programs. That said, I didn't buy the keyboard for the sequencing, I bought it to play live, so its not really an issue for me.

Conclusion

I'm looking forward to using the Krome at upcoming gigs and not having to punch the buttons quite so hard as I have been getting used to with my ageing N5! The sounds are ultimately what make this keyboard a really impressive choice, so it will be good to see how I can best use them in the songs I play. A nice added bonus is that Korg are also offering a full 3 year warranty on all Krome models, so that's great news, especially if the power button/socket turns out to be an issue longer term. Although I have never had to test Korg's customer service, so how useful this will be remains to be seen.

I would like to thank Tom Osborne at Absolute Musicfor his help. Absolute Music are based in Bournemouth in the UK which is some way from me in Kent, but I have always had great service from them and nothing ever seems too much trouble. I'm hoping they open a shop nearby in Kent one day!