Venom in the house
Posted By Scott on September 7, 2011
My prized Roland RD-700 and case has been sold. :-( Though I loved the sounds on the RD-700 my finger joints never liked those fully weighted keys. The lightly-weighted rounded edged keys on the Juno Stage are just so much more pleasant to practice on. With the RD-700 gone there was open keyboard stand just begging to be used and I quickly obliged.
M-Audio Venom
At Sweetwater Gearfest 2011 in June I got some hands on time on the new M-Audio Venom and attended an hour demo there on it. It’s a new product, under $450, and comes with a lovely computer based program editor to help setup user presets, sound and arp beats on it. But a warning … the Venom is not for someone looking for a keyboard to learn piano with as it doesn’t even have piano voices on it. Instead it is loaded with aggressive synth sounds and arps. Definitely not my type of music but I want to expand my horizons and thus I went for it.
In a user setup you can layer and or split the keyboard with as many as 4 sounds. Each sound is associated with an arpeggio so you could get 4 arps playing at once. Buttons on the keyboard allow you to control the 4 sounds during a live performance. So that’s the skinny on the M-Audio Venom. Watch for a Youtube of me using it later this fall.
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