Korg Pa5X – PROFESSIONAL ARRANGER Overview

Korg Pa5X is the new flagship in the KORG Professional Arranger lineup, redefining an arranger keyboard. Completely redesigned with a state-of-the-art sound engine and a streamlined color-driven user interface, Pa5X produces a stunningly rich and unique sonic experience that inspires you to create and perform!

Korg Pa5X comes packed with thousands of inspiring Sounds and hundreds of fresh Styles, all instantly accessible through an inviting workflow. A completely new front panel featuring an assignable Pad Matrix and Mixer section, multicolored LED buttons, and a huge tilt-able touchscreen puts you in control of your music making experience at all times. Pa5X excels both as a live performance instrument and as a powerful creative tool in the studio, allowing you to find your ideal sound no matter where your music takes you.

Premium Quality and Elegant Design

The Korg Pa5X was designed with elegance and durability in mind, featuring a sturdy aluminum body and genuine wooden side-panels for a luxury appearance. All of the keybeds on Pa5X provide an authentic feel and full control of expression for any playing situation. The 88-key weighted action has a realistic piano-like touch while the 76- and 61-key versions feature lighter touch semi-weighted keys. All the keybeds include aftertouch control for added expressivity.

Modern and Streamlined User Interface

At the center of Korg Pa5X is a large 8” tiltable touch screen that displays a completely redesigned GUI (graphical user interface). This makes all the sounds and features of Pa5X easily accessible to home and studio musicians as well as live performers. The colors in the display are carefully matched to the ones used in the LED programmable buttons on the control panel. This color driven interface allows you to easily navigate Pa5X, adding color to your music!

Powerful EDS-XP Sound Engine for Rich and Inspiring Sounds

KORG Professional Arrangers have set the industry standard for powerful musical expression, featuring sound engines that inspire musicians to create and perform. Pa5X introduces the EDS-XP (Enhanced Definition Synthesis – Expanded) sound-engine, which builds upon the technology used in Pa4X with advanced hardware and a powerful new operating system, taking sounds on Pa5X to a new level. The 24 stereo Oscillators and 160 voices of polyphony power thousands of high-quality sounds, covering a wide range of musical instruments and genres. The EDS-XP sound engine also introduces new cutting-edge features such as Round-Robin drum and percussion performance, Smooth Sound Transition, Sound-Controller 3 functionality and much more. This provides an unprecedented level of sonic realism and expression that is only available on Pa5X.

Realtime Controllers

Pa5X features a fully programmable control section with 9 buttons and 9 sliders. You can assign any function to it, from mixer volume to drawbar settings, from microphone mute to bass inversion, to lyrics scroll commands and more. The assigned function is shown by an auxiliary strip display so that you always know what you have under your fingertips – even if you are on a different page to the main display.

Numerous assignable controllers are available for expressive real time playing and Korg’s DNC (Defined Nuance Control) which supplies so much of the detail in the sound of musical instruments. Faders, switches, real and virtual matrices of real time controls, the joystick, and the ribbon controller can be assigned to modulate any parameter of the sound. This provides precise control of the most subtle nuances and articulation of the instruments you are playing on the Pa5x.

Advanced Chord Recognition System and Full Library of Chord Sequences

Pa5X’s chord recognition system is the most sophisticated around, featuring an Expert mode that is crafted around the playing styles of the best modern jazz pianists. This chord recognition system can be as simple or advanced as desired, even allowing you to trigger chords with a single finger!

With automatic harmonization, a chord sequencer, and a sophisticated chord recognition engine, Pa5X gives you the tools to create rich musical arrangements no matter what the genre of music.

Smooth Transitions between Sounds, Styles and Songs

Pa5X adds Smooth Sound Transition (SST) technology, allowing for seamless transitions between Sounds, Styles and Songs without any interruption. When you select a different element, the sound, effects and sequences will continue to play, fading away naturally until you are ready for the next sequence or note to begin, making for an uninterrupted and realistic performance.

Cutting-edge Dual Crossfading Players

Pa5x can play two Styles, MIDI files, or MP3 files simultaneously and in any combination, made possible by the dual onboard Players*. These two Players can be mixed with a handy crossfader, or can be used to play a song while another one is waiting to start. All the while, Pa5X’s sound engine delivers the power, effects processing, and polyphony to make these transitions happen seamlessly.
*KORG’s exclusive XDS Crossfade Dual Sequencer/Player

Lyrics, Chords, Score and Marker can be clearly shown on the large internal display of Pa5X, or even on an external display when connected via the built-in HDMI port. A wide variety of Lyrics formats are supported, and you can even automatically generate a score from a MIDI Song. Markers allow for quick navigation of a song using the Style-Element buttons, allowing you to easily jump back to a passage you wish to repeat while studying, rehearsing, or performing live.

Creating Styles and Songs

You can create your own Styles, and record your own MIDI and MP3 Songs. The included editing features allow for detailed editing of each single recorded event. A sophisticated transposition table adapts the sequences to any chord you may play.

You can record a MIDI Song using a full-featured Sequencer. Even easier, just record what you sing and play (including MP3 Songs) as an MP3 file, and listen to it anywhere you like.

Chord-track implementation

The newly implemented chord-track for Syles can be shown and edited in the Event Edit page of Style-Edit environment. All chord-sensitive tracks in Intros and Endings will follow this chord-line. This new chord track gives you a great flexibility to understand easy and fast, which chord progression is present in Intros and Endings. Active pads or also guitar tracks playing in sync with your arrangement, will also follow this chord progression in your music.

Groove import for Audio-slices

The import feature for sliced grooves allows users to create more slices than ever before. Each groove will be saved in .mid-format to import it later while creating a new Style or Pad or while modifying an existing one. It is also possible to decide to save the groove as a Sound or as a Drumkit to let the user assign sliced Drum samples to Drum families. This feature expands the flexibility of the Pa5X and everyone can generate his own audio groove Styles using the slice feature.