Amazing! This is very useful information...however...haha...I have no clue where to find and how much to set each "tuning". "A little more", "a bit of sustain" doesn't help me much yet as I just bought the keyboard a week ago and am still figuring out the menus. Which piano is used? What strings are used?...any idea? This is a great start and I'll work with your suggestions to see what I can come up with. Thanks for your help! I'll keep you posted!
My first recommendation is to go through each sound and see how they sound to you. Yeah, I konw there are a lot of them on the Kross 2, but you should probably go through them just to hear them. You may find, upon initial listening, that they sound a bit dry and dull. Do not worry, Korg kind of does things this way. What I have found with my many years with Korg products, is that they are kind of dry at first. When you add Reverb to them, they will really open up the sound, especially on the Piano sounds.
For 'Love Walks In', you could use the Kross Grand Piano, Stereo Grand Piano, or maybe even a Bright Piano for the principal sound in the Combi you will make for it. You could even probably use the Rock Piano program. It may work the best.
For the String part, there should be a program called Synth Strings or Analog Strings that you could use. Two programs you can check out are the Synth String Pad and Analog Strings.
For the Synth part, look for a Saw type synth sound in the Synth Lead Category. Keep in mind that sometimes, the lead synth sounds are going to be monophonic (meaning you can only play a single note). You can change this in the program itself, by changing it from Mono to Poly. It is some of the first menus when you are editing the program. Save your new program to a User location and you should be fine. Fat Saw Lead, Unison Pad, or Saw Ensemble Synth might work for this layer.
For 'Dreams', You could probably use a similar type setup as you would for 'Love Walks In', but I would probably add an EP sound in there, something like an FM Piano or FM EP sound to add to the attack of the Piano sound. I would also map the volume of the strings and pad to the Mod Wheel so that you could control the volume of them so they do not add mud to the percussive parts of the song after the intro... this will be explained in the manual. You could also add a volume (also called expression) pedal to the Kross 2 and you could control the volume that way on each track you set it up for.
For 'Why Can't This Be Love', what you choose depends on what you are playing. If you are doing the bass part in the beginning of the song, then I would go through your bass sounds, as none of them look familiar to me. For the synthy sound after the intro, you could certainly use Fat Sync Lead or MS2K FastSync Lead for the Hard Sync sound that VH used for that song. I would recommend splitting the keyboard to where the bass is on the left and the sync synth sounds are on the right.
With all of these, you will need to add EFX as well, and that is explained in the manual and is much easier than my trying to explain it here.
Once you get the navigation down on the Kross, then you will be breezing around that thing like nobody's business. Another thing to consider - there is an editor for the Kross 2 that you can run on your PC or as a plugin for your DAW. Just plug in a USB cable between the two, fire up the editor and you will be able to navigate around much easier that fiddling through all of the menus. I have used the editor for my Kross 1 quite a lot for designing sounds and it really is helpful and much easier than navigating around through that LCD screen.
I hope that this helps a bit more. All of the synth programs I speak of are based on the Program Listing sheet for the original Kross 2. If you have the new Kross 2, you may have additional sounds that I did not find on the list.
Grace,
Harry
