Kurzweil PC361 Synth

[darkandrew]

With the prospect of some gigs in the New Year I decided to look at the possibility of recreating the sounds I get from my studio based soft synths (Arturia V Collection, NI Komplete, etc) with a hardware based synth. I mainly play bass but also play some keyboard stuff and what I was looking for was a synth with a decent synth-action keyboard (I don't like piano-style weighted or hammer action keys), good strings sounds and virtual analogue synth emulation. It also goes without saying that I wanted to spend as little as possible. I eventually settled on the Kurzweil PC361 for the following reasons:

Sounds: 8/10 - It's strings sounds were about the best I could find and its VA sounds were also really good (great for anologue style pads and leads), piano sounds were slightly less good (but still very usable) and a welcome addition was the inclusion of authentic Mellotron samples. Other sounds were less impressive but since these were not needed it wasn't really an issue for me.

Keybed: 8/10 - A really nice synth action - not too heavy but with a little weight, overall very fast and playable.

Ease of use: 3/10 - The Kurzweil 3 series' strength lies in its VAST achitecture which is a modular architecture that allows you to select oscillators, filters, DSPs, etc at will and arrange them in any order - be it in series or in parallel - this means that you can create virtually any sound you wish using a combinations of wavetable samples or DSP generated waveforms (such as sine, triangle, sawtooth, supersaw, square, etc). The down side to this is that it is extremely complex and not as accessable as something like a Roland SH01 GAIA for example.

Value for money: 10/10 - This is Kurz's biggest selling point, pound for pound it just wipes the floor with everthing else in the same price range. If you were comparing the sounds alone (ignoring the complexities of trying to programme this beast) it would quite happily hold its own against Yamaha's Motif and is 1000 times more versatile than an Access Virus - both of which would set you back arond £800 more than the "street price" of a Kurz PC361.

Overall: 8/10 - An excellent synth, with decent strings and mellotron samples and an equally good virtual analogue engine, unbeatable value for money (currently £1199) however its not the easiset synth I've ever programmed.

Edited December 27, 2010 by darkandrew