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Purgatory Creek VKC for Montage or MODX

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Hello fans of the Montage. Has anyone ever tested Purgatory Creek's VKC (vintage keyboard collection) sound bank? Especially the sounds Mark I and V ...
Opinions ?

 
Posted : 22/01/2019 9:15 am
Jason
Posts: 8238
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Part of a "Rhodes shootout" thread in another forum includes some review of the Purgatory Creek Mark V and Mark I Rhodes. The user mentions he prefers the Mark I - and apparently at the time of the post they were distributed separately. The set here (the collection) includes both - and more.

Source: http://forum.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/1907986/Chick_s_Rhodes_on_the_Motif_XF.html

A couple of other "free" Rhodes to consider:

- The Purgatory Creek Mark V
- Jeff Lear's Mark I

(they're only free if you use a free player, and the free Kontakt Player will only play them in demo mode so that doesn't count)

I much prefer Jeff's Mark I out of these two, because of it's warm tone with less tine noise. (it's very impressive indeed, IMHO). Bill Busch(sp?) who runs Purgatory Creek did an older model Rhodes and I suspect it's still available somewhere. There was a demo with Gigasampler and I preferred that to this Mark V sound.

You can also see that, at one point, the Mark I was distributed through a 3rd party for $99 - not sure how much the Mark V was by itself. That you get both (and more) now for half that historical price is a good thing for the consumer.

There's a lot of other discussion there about different sampled and modeled Rhodes.

Back to the VKC - the support website has demo recordings of most of the instruments/settings. These are fairly informative to make some of your own observations. The PDF goes into some detail about what's included:

The Vintage Keyboard Collection for the Yamaha Montage®/MODX® includes seven
electro-mechanical keyboards from the 1960s and 1970s. They include:
- Mark I (1975) tine-based piano
- Mark V (1984) tine-based piano
- 200a reed-based piano
- 140b rare reed-based piano from the 1960s
- Pianet N another rare reed-based instrument from the 1960s
- Clavinet D6 string-based instrument (the three common pickup settings DB, CA, CB)
- CP70a string-based portable acoustic piano
All the instruments were deeply sampled at up to six velocity levels. All, except for the CP70B,
include release samples. File size: 550MB.

So you can determine if you have around 0.6GB left to install the set too.

The CP70a sounds pretty good to me. Everything in the set sounds good to me.

Current Yamaha Synthesizers: Montage Classic 7, Motif XF6, S90XS, MO6, EX5R

 
Posted : 22/01/2019 5:35 pm
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Thank you very much Jason for your accurate and well-argued answer. I had listened to the various demos, but I'm still wary of these demos because they are of course very optimized. That's why I wanted to have the opinion of a direct user with his Montage.
Having owned a CP80 several years, it is precisely the quality of the rendering of the CP70 that challenged me. By telling me that the Rhodes of this pack VKC could also be very close to the real ones.
I will take advantage of the offer very soon, at $ 49 I do not take much risk ...
Excuse the translation, it may not always be good.

 
Posted : 23/01/2019 7:03 am
Jason
Posts: 8238
Illustrious Member
 

Full disclosure - I have not played these on a Montage or anything else. Comments on how things sounded were based on the demos. The thread was provided as those users seemed to have more direct experience.

The main "ding" people have with the Rhodes (and, for me, this applies to both sample sets Mark I and Mark V in the collection) is that there is more tine / bell sound than preferred. This is a variation by setup, EQ, hammer material, etc ... and some really like this sound (thinking Dyno mod as one extreme). I think applying EQ can soften this a bit. I do like how some of the sets from Purgatory have imperfections "sampled in" - so not everything sounds perfectly even. Not available for Montage - but the upright bass is like this. Buzzy things - stuff that's normal for a good pizzicato jazz bass sound. I hear some of this in the Rhodes to a lesser degree (which is good, to me).

For $50 - it is hard to go wrong if the other EPs are useful to you. There will be something in there worth the cheese. And then you can experiment with layering multiple to come up with hybrid sounds.

Current Yamaha Synthesizers: Montage Classic 7, Motif XF6, S90XS, MO6, EX5R

 
Posted : 23/01/2019 6:29 pm
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