KEDITOR GRAND
An acoustic piano editor for the K2700.
Choose one of five sampled pianos, then shape its lid, its microphone, its room and its touch. Or record a piano of your own and build it for the K2700.
Every patch starts from a piano and puts a room around it: a lid you open with the mouse, a microphone you move nearer or further away, a voicing EQ, the strings' sympathetic resonance, the release, the key and pedal noises, a compressor, a tempo delay and a hall. You hear each move at once, in the app or on your K2700.
Every control is one of the K2700's own knobs, sliders or buttons, so a stored patch keeps answering the instrument's panel without the app. And when you want a piano of your own, the built-in sampler records it from an instrument or an AU plugin, finds its loops and builds it into a K2700 piano, with its .K27 file.
What it does
Five sampled pianos
Grand Intimate, Bright German, Concert Grand, Italian Grand and Classic Upright, each with pedal-down resonance, key-release samples and a room of its own on screen.
Lid and microphone
Drag the lid: closed, short stick or full stick. Move the microphone from 0.35 m at the hammers to 2.4 m in the room.
Voicing EQ
BASS and MID at ±16 dB, MID FREQ, TREBLE at ±20 dB, and SIZZLE: up to +15 dB of air above 9 kHz.
String resonance
The sympathetic ring of the undamped strings, switched on a button, its amount on a slider.
Release and noises
The dampers' release from ×1 to ×8; the key-release and pedal noises from off to +20 dB, quieter as the microphone moves away.
Compressor, delay, hall
A soft-knee compressor, a delay in note values at the tempo, and 19 reverb rooms from Booth to Large.
Dynamic Response Curve
Which velocity layer each velocity plays: LINEAR, SOFT, HARD, two points to drag, or every boundary set by hand.
K2700 CONTROLS
The K2700's 9 knobs, 9 sliders and 9 buttons as on the instrument, each with what it does in this patch. Move them here or there.
LINK
The K2700 plays the patch in its edit buffer and follows every control live while you play. Nothing is stored until you say so.
STORE and READ
A patch becomes a USER program, read back to check. READ brings it back into the editor, lid, microphone and curve included.
EXPORT .K27
The patches alone, for a K2700 that has the piano, or the piano with its patches, for one that does not.
NEW PIANO SAMPLER
Record, loop, review and build a piano of your own in 1 to 8 velocity layers, from an instrument or an AU plugin.
It stays on your K2700
Each of the 22 controls is a K2700 knob, slider or button in Program mode. A patch you store keeps its lid, microphone, EQ, noises and room on the instrument's own panel, with no Mac in sight.
NEW PIANO SAMPLER
Record a piano from an audio input with MIDI, or from an Audio Unit instrument, in 1 to 8 velocity layers. The loops are found for you; review them by ear and by eye, then BUILD a K2700 piano.
Everything on one window
The room on the left, the rack on the right, a full keyboard below. Four tabs share the room's space: THE ROOM, DYNAMIC RESPONSE CURVE, K2700 CONTROLS and CONFIG. The sampler opens over the whole window.
A piano in a room
Drag the lid up or down and let go: it settles on its stick (ON STICK), or stays wherever you leave it (HOLD). Drag the microphone away from the strings, or choose CLOSE, NEAR or ROOM. SOUND PATHS draws the sound leaving the piano; with the lid low, the highs stay under it.
- The lid is an EQ in the piano's effects, on slider 7: closed, it takes 15.6 dB off above 6 kHz; on the short stick, 5.4 dB.
- The microphone blends a small room into the direct sound, on slider 8: at NEAR the piano is 2.5 dB down overall, at ROOM 8 dB, and the key and pedal noises fall with it.
- The readouts below the room: the distance, the wet / dry mix, the pre-delay, the noises' level, the lid's angle and what it takes off at 8 kHz.
Each piano with a room of its own
Choose the piano under PIANO and the room changes with it: walnut boards and a midnight oval rug for the intimate grand, a near-black stage floor for the concert grand, honey chevron parquet for the Italian. The upright is drawn as an upright, its top lid closed, half or all the way open.
- Grand Intimate: warm and close, with eight starter patches from Concert Lid to Indie Room.
- Bright German: nine velocity layers, its undamped top octaves sampled on their own.
- Concert Grand: the big hall piano, and the lightest to install (272 MB).
- Italian Grand: rich and singing, with five patches drawn from the programs it came with.
- Classic Upright: a parlour upright, its dampers up to D6.
Your touch, layer by layer
The curve takes the velocity you play to the velocity the layers see. LINEAR is the piano as it was sampled; SOFT brings the loud layers in sooner, HARD asks for more force. Drag its two points, or drag a boundary between two layers by hand.
- The map shows each layer as a bar over its own velocities, with the windows written under them.
- Everything follows: the notes, the pedal resonance, the undamped top and the key releases, which also change level with their window.
- On the K2700 the windows are part of the program: they go with the LINK, STORE and EXPORT.
The K2700's panel, mapped
This tab draws the K2700's control section, with what each control does in this patch and its value now. Move one here and the app follows; move it on the K2700 and the tab follows. Learn the layout once, then play without the screen.
- Knobs 1–9: BASS, MID, MID FREQ, TREBLE, COMPRESSION, SIZZLE, DELAY FEEDBACK, DELAY TIME, REVERB TIME.
- Sliders 1–9: KEY RELEASE, REVERB TYPE, PEDAL NOISE, RELEASE, DELAY AMOUNT, STRING RES, LID, MIC DISTANCE, REVERB AMOUNT.
- Buttons: 1 EQ ON, 6 STRING RES ON, 8 DELAY ON, 9 REVERB ON. Buttons 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 are kept free.
Find your pianos on the K2700, then play it live
Each piano is installed on the K2700 once, from its .K27 file, and the K2700 gives it the next free USER IDs. CONFIG finds them: turn the LINK on, SCAN a range of USER IDs, and FILL FROM SCAN puts each piano's program and chains in place. Every change is kept at once.
- With the LINK on, the K2700 takes the patch into its edit buffer at your first change, then follows each control live. Nothing is written to its memory.
- The header says what the K2700 is playing: the patch, its piano and the program's ID, or why it is not.
- STORE ON K2700 writes the patch as a USER program, "GRD" and its name, and reads it back to check. READ FROM K2700 brings a stored patch back into the editor.
A .K27 file for a USB stick
Without the LINK, EXPORT writes the patches as a .K27 file the K2700 loads from a USB stick: GLOBAL > FILE > LOAD, then FILL. Each patch becomes a program named "GRD" and its name, with its 22 controls and its curve, ready to find by name.
- PATCHES ONLY: a few KB, for a K2700 that already has the piano.
- PIANO + PATCHES: the piano itself too, its samples, keymaps and chains, for a K2700 that does not (272 to 580 MB).
- Tick the patches you want: the presets, your USER patches, and the one open now, as it is.
Record a piano of your own
The sampler records a piano key by key and layer by layer: from an instrument, its audio into the Mac and the notes and sustain pedal sent over MIDI, or from an AU instrument plugin, played offline faster than real time. Six steps take you there: SOURCE, SETUP, CALIBRATE, RECORD, REVIEW and BUILD.
- 1 to 8 velocity layers at the velocities you choose, any range of keys, one recorded key every 1 to 12 semitones.
- What the piano has: pedal-down takes for the strings' resonance, key releases at three dynamics, the K2700's pedal noises. One click sets up an acoustic or an electric piano.
- Each note records until its decay holds steady, in level and in timbre, where a clean loop can be found. The time and size estimates follow every change.
Every loop, by ear and by eye
Every take gets its sample and its loop as soon as it is recorded. REVIEW shows them all in a grid: green, amber to check, red to record again. Open one to see the take, its steady part, the loop and its crossfade, and to hear the sample as the program will play it.
- Measured as it plays: the joint, the click, the blend, the crossfade dip, the ends' level and the timbre across the loop.
- Change a loop: drag its ends, nudge them, or mark a window and FIND IN THE WINDOW: the two best loops of each of four techniques, whole crossfade, short crossfade, no crossfade and bidirectional.
- Nothing is lost: UNDO, AUTOMATIC, ACCEPT, the take before a new recording, and keys to move from take to take and listen.
From takes to a K2700 piano
BUILD turns the session into a piano of the app: the samples at one level for the whole piano, a keymap per layer, and a program on the same pattern as the five pianos, its envelopes fitted to the loops and its velocity tracking to the layers. It appears in the PIANO list, ready to play and to shape, and its .K27 is written for the K2700.
- At the level of the other pianos, so that patches move between them.
- Tuning kept as recorded, or corrected to equal temperament.
- Key releases at their recorded levels, or by the same law as the other pianos.
Five pianos to start from
Each piano plays in the app as it does on the K2700, and is installed on the K2700 once, from its own .K27 file.
| Piano | Character | Velocity layers | Starter patches | On the K2700 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grand Intimate | A warm, close grand; key releases in six layers | 8 | 8: Concert Lid, Studio Close, Jazz Club, Lid Down, Big Hall, Pop Punch, Echo Ballad, Indie Room | 436 MB |
| Bright German | Bright and clear; the undamped top, F6 to C8, sampled on its own | 9 | 2: German Stage, German Room | 454 MB |
| Concert Grand | The concert-hall grand | 8 | 2: Concert Stage, Concert Hall | 272 MB |
| Italian Grand | Rich and singing; a string resonance that grows under the pedal | 8 | 5: Italian Stage, Italian Warm, Studio Hall, Italian Rock, Jazz Room | 580 MB |
| Classic Upright | A parlour upright; dampers up to D6 | 8 | 2: Upright Parlour, Upright Open | 445 MB |
Every piano has its pedal-down resonance layers, key-release samples at three dynamics and the K2700's own pedal noises. Its .K27 holds its program, its three GRAND effect chains, its keymaps and its samples.
The K2700's controls, mapped
In Program mode each of the K2700's controls sends a MIDI controller; every GRAND patch answers these 22. They work in the app, over the LINK, and in a stored program on its own.
| On the K2700 | Control | CC | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knob 1 | BASS | 71 | −16 to +16 dB |
| Knob 2 | MID | 73 | −16 to +16 dB |
| Knob 3 | MID FREQ | 72 | 311 Hz to 1.76 kHz |
| Knob 4 | TREBLE | 79 | −20 to +20 dB, at 3.3 kHz |
| Knob 5 | COMPRESSION | 14 | off, then down to −30 dB at 3:1 |
| Knob 6 | SIZZLE | 17 | 0 to +15 dB above 9 kHz |
| Knob 7 | DELAY FEEDBACK | 18 | 0 to 90 % |
| Knob 8 | DELAY TIME | 3 | 1/16, 1/8, dotted 1/8, 1/4, dotted 1/4 |
| Knob 9 | REVERB TIME | 9 | 0.5 to 10 s |
| Slider 1 | KEY RELEASE | 12 | off, −40 to +20 dB (0 dB at 85) |
| Slider 2 | REVERB TYPE | 13 | 19 rooms, Booth1 to Large4 |
| Slider 3 | PEDAL NOISE | 22 | off, −40 to +20 dB (0 dB at 85) |
| Slider 4 | RELEASE | 23 | ×1 (the dampers) to ×8 |
| Slider 5 | DELAY AMOUNT | 24 | off to 100 % |
| Slider 6 | STRING RES | 25 | 0 to 100 % wet |
| Slider 7 | LID | 26 | closed, short stick … full stick |
| Slider 8 | MIC DISTANCE | 27 | 0.35 to 2.4 m |
| Slider 9 | REVERB AMOUNT | 28 | 0 to 100 % |
| Button 1 | EQ ON | 80 | the voicing EQ and SIZZLE in or out |
| Button 6 | STRING RES ON | 86 | on / off |
| Button 8 | DELAY ON | 89 | on / off |
| Button 9 | REVERB ON | 90 | on / off |
| Sustain pedal | SUSTAIN | 64 | the dampers; the pedal noises |
Buttons 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 are kept free. Two settings live in the app: the lid's release (ON STICK or HOLD) and the Dynamic Response Curve, which goes to the K2700 with the patch.
From the app to the instrument
Install the pianos
Each piano's .K27 on a USB stick; on the K2700, GLOBAL > FILE > LOAD and FILL. Once per piano.
Find them
In CONFIG: the K2700's MIDI port, LINK, SCAN, FILL FROM SCAN. The IDs are kept.
Play and shape
With the LINK on, the K2700 plays the patch and follows every control as you move it.
Store
STORE ON K2700 writes a USER program, "GRD" and its name, and reads it back to check.
Play without the Mac
The K2700's knobs, sliders and buttons still move the lid, the microphone, the EQ and the room.
What you need
- Platform
- macOS 12 or later.
- To play
- The app plays its pianos itself: no K2700 is needed to hear and shape a patch.
- K2700
- A Kurzweil K2700 on USB for the LINK, STORE and READ. Each piano is installed on it once from its .K27 file (LOAD, FILL).
- Space
- The five pianos take about 2.3 GB in the app, and their .K27 files about 2.2 GB. On the K2700 each piano uses 272 to 580 MB of sample memory.
- Sampler
- An audio input and a MIDI output to the instrument you sample, or an AU instrument plugin. 48 kHz, stereo or mono, 1 to 8 velocity layers.
- Files
- .K27 export: the patches, or the piano and its patches. Patches and settings in the app's data folder.
Be the first to know
KEDITOR GRAND is in development. Leave your email and we'll write when it's ready.