Kawai K5

Single Patch Editor

This editor will work with the Kawai K5 and Kawai K5m.

Communicating with Edisyn

Turn of memory protect. Set your K5 to transmit and receive <SYSTEM> MIDI on the same channel as you've set up Edisyn (perhaps channel 1?), and likewise to transmit and receive <EXCLUSIVE> MIDI on that same channel.

About Patch SID-12

The Kawai K5 has no sysex command which would enable Edisyn to send a patch to its temporary memory. However this is important to enable merging, nudging, hill-climbing, randomization, etc. One way to get around this is to send individual parameters one by one. However the K5 has a great deal of parameters, so this approach is simply too slow.

So instead of sending a patch to temporary memory, Edisyn writes the patch to patch number SID-12 (the very last one). This will erase and overwrite this patch and basically treat it as a scratch area.

About the Harmonics Display

Each Harmonics tab has a display. This display is not like other displays in Edisyn: you can edit it by clicking and dragging in it. Note that as you hover over the display, the harmonic you'd be editing is highlighted in white, and the corresponding level dial has its number shown in red.

The display has two parts: the lower part shows the harmonics level, and the upper part shows the choice of envelope (there are five choices: 0="off", 1, 2, 3, and 4). If you are in Full Mode (see the Global tab), then the harmonics from both voices are shown together with a little divider line. Otherwise only the harmonics from the displayed voice are shown.

You can constrain which harmonics will be affected by your editing. For example, if you constrain the harmonics to "Odd", then only the odd harmonics will be edited when you drag your mouse over them. The other harmonics will be drawn in gray to indicate that they are unaffected by you. Note that there are several more harmonics options available to you than in the K5's own editor.

You can also constrain which envelope will be set when you edit -- this is useful because it can be hard to precisely set the envelope using the display. If you constrain the envelope to "3" for example, the the only options you'll be able to set will be 3 and OFF.

Last, you can set the harmonics to one of several presets such as sawtooth or square waves.

Note that drawing on the harmonics display will normally be jumpy and glitchy because every change you make on the display sends an associated MIDI parameter sysex messages to the synth, and this requires a significant pause or the K5 will not respond properly. You can disable this in one of two ways: either Disconnect MIDI, or turn off "Sends Real Time Changes", both located in the MIDI menu. After that you should find drawing in the display to be much smoother (and various other operations, like setting a Preset, to be much faster).

About the Menu

The Kawai K5 menu has three menu options which allow you to load a single-cycle wave and store its harmonics in the Harmonics 1, Harmonics 2, or (assuming Full Mode is on) Harmonics 1+2 combined. Single-cycle waves must be stored as 16-bit WAV files no longer than 2048 samples. A good source of single-cycle waves is the AdventureKid Waveforms collection (https://www.adventurekid.se/akrt/waveforms/adventure-kid-waveforms/), which has thousands of waveforms, all free.

Gotchas

By    Sean Luke
Date    April 2018