Kurzweil K2000

Nine years after I first decided that I wanted this synth I found one languishing in a used keyboard department for $1200. I don’t think the staff knew it had the orchestral ROM board in it. I have since dropped 64MB of RAM and a 500MB drive into it, with the generous assistance of my own personal keyboard tech and fellow vintage synth enthusiast Jim Burdon.

11/30/01 Added P-RAM upgrade and OS 3.87. Quite pleased with results.

1/23/02 K2000 falls ill, ostensibly a result of the upgrades.

2/1/02 Faulty PRAM replaced, power supply upgraded. All is well. SCSI transfers and MIDI communication with SoundDiver show marked improvement.

If you’re interested, there are many useful links for this unit on the links page, including free sounds, tech notes, and tips on using this with a Macintosh system, including where to find a utility for formatting a non-supported drive as DOS from a Mac.

The Free Oxnard Five

Download five original patches for your K2XXX synth as a Stuffit or Zip archive. Here are some of the sounds you’ll get:

Ligeti: An homage to the choral requiem used as the “monolith music” in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Data slider controls random pitch rate.

Prophet Saw Pad: A mellow saw pad with velocity-sensitive envelope and mono pressure activated polymod filter effect.

8va Clocked Arpeggio: Clock-sync arpeggiator effect. Data slider adds portamento to background layer, mod wheel adds square wave amp mod.