Korg Workshop at Orewa Music 21st January 2009

This is one for the Korg fans ('Korgies' as they are affectionately referred as). Another successful and highly informative session was held at Orewa Music at 7.30pm this evening. The Workshop was conducted by Kane Steves and Rod Moffat. As the numbers of attendees have increased, there were some 25 or so attendees tonight, the ability to gather around the keyboard with functions being demonstrated has become nigh on impossible. To overcome this Stephen Hindson kindly brought along his Sony camcorder, projector and screen so everybody could see the buttons being pushed and follow the chord techniques demonstrated.

The evening started with cheese and wine -very civilized - and then followed by Rod Moffat covering topics such as chord inversions and 6th and 7th chord constructions. Rod demonstrated on his Korg Pa1X Pro (extended keyboard version) whilst Kane demonstrated on a Korg Pa50 keyboard. The writer was pleased that Rod clarified that when using keyboards with the left-hand split in place it is imperative that the chords be played in the root inversion if you want the harmonizing accompaniments and ensemble voicing to sound correctly. Rod is only the second person to mention this important point in my experience (the other person being of course John Bercich).

Kane demonstrated backups (so you don't ever lose your sound and performance setups) and global saving methods for any default settings wanted to be permanently active such as changing the default reverb setting. Kane also recapped stride piano and arpeggiated chording techniques such as used by Richard Clayderman.  Kane then demonstrated this very nicely by playing "From A Distance" with and without the arpeggiation of the chords. Also, Kane covered the use of the Pitch Bend and Modulation combined device that all Korg keyboards have. Kane explained that this is important to get a realistic Hawaiian guitar effect or with brass instruments. The beauty of the Korg 'stick' is that is allows you to both bend and modulate fairly easily in sync which is very difficult to do when these two effects are controlled by separate wheels.

All in all a very useful Workshop and I am sure everybody took away some useful tips. Thanks Kane, Rod and Stephen Hindson for your assistance in making this a great evening. For those interested and or could not get to the event, Stephen has created a DVD of the evening which is available at a modest cost of $15 (to defray expenses). The video shows up close the fingering techniques discussed and the button pushes to achieve the various functions covered on the evening. Contact: Stephen at Creatif Video 09 426 2098.

It is recommended that you keep checking this Web Site as postings will be made in advance in the activities calendar for future Korg Workshops.