Peavey Musebox, Price Breakthrough

[cameron]

Mine is due here Tuesday, along with the JBL EON 210P P.A. I ordered to run it though (since my old circa 1980 Yamaha P.A. now has more snap, crackle and pop than a box of Rice Krispies).

I suspect that guy had a bad unit or was doing something wrong, but I do hope the piano has sufficient dynamic range. I've got a 1988 Kurzweil K1000 if I want that compressed sound. The UVI demos don't seem particularly impressive to me. Sort of like the muddy Pianoteq demo I heard recently. I'm actually prepared not to like it-- there aren't all that many piano VSTs that impress me either-- but if it's anywhere near what my Galaxy Vintage-D is I'll be a happy camper to get that sound on stage.

I would expect a 30 second load time for a good piano patch. The Muse Research guy was right in that respect... it takes me longer than that to load the Vintage-D samples on my dual-core PC. The Musebox is really just a ruggedized computer, after-all. Yes, digital pianos load quickly, and that's also why they mostly sound like crap.

Cam

[mojobone]

Yeah, I maybe shouldn't be so critical; it's a tall order to gin up a custom Linux OS to run plugins that weren't designed for it, and Muse deserves kudos for pioneering the use of VST plugs in the gigspace. It's just that the potential is so great for someone like myself; I'll never be satisfied with Alesis' native drum sounds on a gig, and this product could potentially solve a huge problem for me, cuz I'm a multi-instrumentalist and I want to sound as good live as in the studio. Seriously, two Museboxes, a keys controller, MIDI pads kit, bass and guitar would let me conveniently take all of my potential musicianship on the road, which is nothing to sneeze at. I would dearly love to have the capability to show an audience my range as a performer, but it's a logistical nightmare to transport and set up five rigs for one gig; the Musebox could make that a physical and financial reality.

[cameron]

Yeah, the Receptor is probably what we both need, but I can't justify the cost. With the amount of live gigs I do anymore I was really a bit foolish even spending as much as I did.

Cam

[cameron]

Ok, got my Musebox in today and spent the evening getting familiar with it and trying out the sounds. My main interest has been to get a killer acoustic piano sound for live gigs... something as good as my Galaxy Vintage-D, which is the best-sounding VST I've ever used. Of course, everyone has different tastes in pianos, and I'm partial to fairly bright ones. My perfect piano sounds like Sarah McLachlan's, or maybe Elton John's off the Honky Chateau album (i.e. Rocket Man), which is probably too harsh for most classical pianists.

The Musebox has quite a few piano presets to choose from, and the star of the show is apparently the "Big" Concert Grand, which is supposedly 800 MB. Most patches load fairly quickly, but this one seems to be the biggest one in the box... close to 30 seconds. Not surprisingly, it sounded the best of all the presets, but I never did find a piano sound that was "just right". The Big grand was a bit muddy for my taste, sounding more like a Baldwin than a Steinway, and some of the velocity and dynamics seemed a bit off for my controller. These are adjustable (from your PC) and I haven't played with the settings, but I assume you can probably fine-tune them to suit both your taste and your midi controller. Other than some midi settings, you aren't really able to customize the presets too much though.

One of the presets is the True Piano "Amber", which is a VST you can buy off the Internet for $79. It has gotten generally good reviews for having a decent sound for such a low price, and it gets kudos for it's small CPU footprint. It uses modeling rather than sampling as I recall. For me it was another case of "close but no cigar"... just TOO bright and harsh, and a little artificial sounding in some parts of the keyboard.

In short, the on-board pianos aren't bad, but I don't think they compare to the best VSTs like Ivory or Galaxy.

The Musebox finally redeemed itself when I realized that you can combine piano sounds, and I came really close to what I was after by combing the muddy "Big" grand and the too bright True Piano Amber into one preset. Finally, a killer piano patch for live gigs!

So now that I'd combined two piano patches, one of which was huge, I was wondering if I'd run into CPU problems. I spent an hour playing it, and it didn't hear it glitch once.

You can use up to two instrument patches plus two effects patches simultaneously, so I next decided to run my mic through one of the on-board effects (Camel Phatt) while using my two combined piano patches. Not only did the effects mostly sound like crap, they instantly caused the pianos to hit the CPU limit. I run into limits with my dual-core I-5 PC too, so I sort of expected that would happen if I overdid it. Based on how quickly the other patches load, I doubt that any are likely to cause CPU issues like the large piano patches. To be fair, there are a whole lot of effects I haven't explored yet, but the Camel Phatt vocal effects seemed pretty useless to me.

There are a lot of Wurly and Rhodes E.P. patches as well as some really nice sounding B3, but none of these are critical to me because you can get decent patches of this sort on just about any synth. One of the organ patches has a nice B3 "growl" , i.e. distortion (maybe a bit TOO much) that I've never heard on any patch before. It is nice to be able to get all these sounds while just taking one keyboard to the gig, and I can choose the midi controller that is most to my liking.

The acoustic guitar patches sound cheesy compared to my RealGuitar VST. There are also LOTS more patches I haven't checked out yet,

Supplied software lets you create your own patches (combinations of existing sounds and effects) and modify midi settings such as keyboard velocity, transpose, etc. It's a cinch to use, although the Musebox did reboot one time when I was saving a custom patch.

In short, this is pretty much Receptor "lite", just like Muse Research says, but it seems a solid box and puts a lot of good, realistic patches at your fingertips. I'd like to be able to load my favorite VSTs, but for 1/2 the price of the Receptor I guess this is a fair tradeoff. In 1984 I bought a Yamaha TX7, basically a DX7 synthesizer minus the keyboard. It had about 29 patches and I think it cost somewhere around $500. 18 years later we have hundreds of sounds, many of which are sampled and much more realistic, for about twice the price. Adjusted for inflation it's probably not that much more than the old TX7 cost. If I still played live professionally, I'd probably get the Receptor, but as more of a hobbyist these days I think this is a decent box for me.

The JBL EON 210P P.A. I bought to play the Musebox through was initially a bit more disappointing. First of all, there is no pan knob for the individual channels, so you're basically mono. Fortunately, there is one stereo input that I could use for the Musebox, but it does not run through the onboard effects or tone controls. The Musebox does have a built-in EQ VST that might work to resolve this issue. I eventually found that speaker placement is critical, and did manage to get the piano sounding good and filling the room in an indirect fashion, just like a real piano. There might be better systems for piano out there, but at less than $500 (Memorial Day sale) I can't complain too much.

[mojobone]

Thanks for the detailed review. Something you might could try is running one of the lighter-weight pianos through the WaveArts Trackplug channel strip; you could compress and EQ one of the darker pianos to cut a bit better, imo. I remember reading somewhere about Elton John's stage rig, I think it was a Ben Folds interview, where he mentioned it involved a Barcus-Berry piezo pickup on the piano lid, (one designed for piano, not the kind used on electric violins, like Jean-luc Ponty used) but I don't recall which preamp he used with it, maybe Pyramid, Perigee, something like that. Ah, maybe Prism? Any case, Ben Folds uses a very similar sound, it might be worth running down his gear list or searching out interviews. I'm thinking a Yamaha C7 might be your oyster, in the sampled-grand department. I know what you mean, cuz Honky Chateau is one of the first records I ever bought, and I'm listening to the remastered CD version as I type this. (it's amazing, save for the bonus alternate take of "Slave", which I coulda lived without)

[cameron]

Since you're familiar with the album, Mojo, the piano on "Mellow" sounds just perfect to me. It's the sound I've been trying to get all these years. Ken Scott engineered that album, and somewhere on-line there's an interview with him where he talks about how they got that piano sound. Up until then they'd been recording in England at Trident, which had a very famous piano used by everyone. The one at Strawberry Studios in France was OK, but not what they were used to, and since a lot of the tracks were played live the other instruments kept bleeding over into the piano mics. They ended up building a plywood box around the piano to isolate the mics.

I'm very happy with what I'm getting out of the Musebox and the JBL P.A. right now. When I add a bit of my Yamaha P-85's sound (from the built-in speakers) into the mix and it gives a nice full sound that fills the room without sounding like it's blaring at you from a speaker. Probably wouldn't work for a classical pianist, but for what I'm doing it sounds great.

Cam

[cameron]

This thing has some cool Wurly sounds too. Some of the best I've heard.

Cam

[cameron]

Update: I've had this box for a few weeks now and am really happy with it. It would obviously be better if you could load any VST into it, but there are enough cool sounds to make it very useful. Someone said, "well then it's basically just an expansion box" to which I say, "yeah, but one with 2 GB of RAM". Since it's almost half the price of its big brother "Receptor" I think that's a fair trade-off.

My primary goal was to have a very nice sounding acoustic piano for live gigs, and by combining two of the Musebox pianos with my Yamaha P-85 I've accomplished that. The excellent Wurlys and B3s are just gravy for me.

Cam