It's our guess that those wizards who work in Ketron's laboratory have had this technology up their sleeves for some time now, but have been waiting for the price of memory chips to become low enough to make it viable. So what is it? Well, we don't really know for sure, but it sounds great! You need to hear it for yourself. Just select one of the "Acoustic" styles, play a chord and hit the intro button. - you'll swear you hear a real guitarist playing, then you'll ask yourself, how do they do that?

It's not just in the "Acoustic" style set you'll hear this, many of the styles will give you a surprise by "popping" in a "live" instrument every now and again to accompany your tune, pure magic. Add to this the famous Ketron "Live" drums (62 different sets) for style backings so life-like you would have thought impossible to achieve. Another little trick that Ketron have added is not so new, but hasn't been seen on a production keyboard before, is "Riffs". Not all the styles have this feature but when one that has, is selected, the 4th style variation button flashes its presence. Now a "Riff" style plays just like any other style with intro ending fills and variations, but when you press the 4th variation "Riff" kicks in and takes over all the chord changes with classic progressions to suit the selected style. It's a lot like having your very own "Jam session" as over the next 24 bars or so the accompaniment builds up adding instruments and, of course, as you now don't need to play the chords you can use 2 hands to play the upper keys. It's really good ear training too as you have to follow "the band".

The story doesn't end there, the SD5 has a brand new sound engine that really bristles with quality. Each and every one of the 290 sampled orchestral sounds are pure over the entire natural instruments range. It may surprise the thousands of Ketron owners who think all the current Ketron sounds can't be improved upon, that we think they have achieved the impossible and actually made the sounds better still.

At one time Ketron's (or Solton's as they used to be called) had quirky controls, this changed some time ago making all the basic sound and style selections absurdly simple to use, OK some of the advance features (that most other keyboards don't even have) take a little more time to understand. To help with these advanced functions the SD5 has "Multi Tab". This is a row of 16 buttons that you can assign to operate various functions. For us, the most obvious use is to assign these to the 198 registration memories giving 16 complete registrations to set up all the sound and style parameters in one hit. When you need to move to the next set of 16 registrations, press the next style set button (1), then for the next 16 press the nest style set button (2) and so on for up to 160 instant registrations - wow!

All the many professional features found on all Ketrons are included in the SD5, such as MIDI song player, microphone input with DSP's, song recorder, multiple splits and sound layers etc., just take a look at the spec sheet for more information, but be aware that Ketron always understate themselves as no amount of words can describe how good they sound.

Keyboard: 61 keys velocity sensitive. 6 Velocity curves. Pitch & Modulation joystick. Aftertouch.
Multi-tab: 1-16 multifunction buttons. Mode Select : Drum On/Off, SFX, GM Part access, Free Assignable, Registration Groups, Arabic scale.
Display: 240 x 128 pixel backlit graphic TCF.
Floppy Disk: 3.5 2DD/HD.
Voices: 290 Orchestral Presets Sounds. More than 1000 Percussion sounds. 32 parts Multitimbral.
User Voices: 110 User Voices. Editing capabilities: A,D,S,R, Cut Off, Resonance, Effects.
1 Touch: 60 programmable 1 Touch/Favourite Sounds, assignable to Styles.
Drawbars: 10 Digital Drawbar effects.
Programs: 120 Programs. 4 Voices, 4 splits. Sustain, Portamento, Velocity switch, Duet, Trio, Morphing, Steel, Slide, Harmony and 2nd voice assign. Single & Global Program loading.
2nd Voice: 292 Preset & programmable Second Voices.
Registrations: 198 panel/song settings. Single & Block modes. Registration Groups 1-16.
Drum 1: 24 New Drum sets . 24 User Drum Sets. 10 Drum sections. Drum Mixer. Manual Drums.
Drum 2: 62 Live Drum sets. New Acoustic and Latin audio Loops.
Arranger: 128 Internal Styles. New Real Latin, Unplugged, Ballroom. New features: Riff, Arranger Mute, After Fill, Smart 7th, Alternate Bass, Swing Bass, Professional Guitar templates. 4 Arrangers: A, B, C, D. 3 Intro/Endings, Fill In, Break. Manual Bass. Jump. Tap Tempo.
Pattern: 2 Mbyte Flash (up to 50 Patterns approx).
Edit functions: Record, Clear, Copy, Remap.
Song Recording: real time Song Recording to Disk (HD or FD).
Pianist: Standard & Auto Piano-style arranger playing modes. Sustain On/Off.
Octave: 1 octave Up/Down.
Double: lower octave coupling.
Harmony: Full, Jazz, Bluegrass, Trill, Repeat, Folk 1/2.
Transposer: +/- 24 half tones.
Arabic Scale: 13 arabic setups (footswitch assignable).
Tune + / - 99 cents per note.
Accordion: International, Belgique. Velocity control to Left&Right. Bass&Lower octave. Left Drum to
Bass&Chord.
Effects: Multieffect DSP. 60 different effects. Reverberation, Chorus, Flanger, Delay, Tap Delay 4 / 8, Wha Wha, Distortion, Overdrive, Rotor Slow/Fast , Bass Boost. Portamento. Mono – Legato function.
Microphone: Input with Gain control. Echo, Reverb., Pan/Pot, Pitch Shift, Talk mode (with no effects).
Midi file Player: SMF Song playback with karaoke and Txt fi les. Converts .kar & Midi type 0 fi les to 1. Juke box. Intelligent Transposer. Song Chain. Drum & Bass. Lead On/Off. Drum Remix.
MIDI: In 1, In2 , Out, Thru. 32 Channels. GM standard.
Outputs: Left/Mono, Right. Sustain & Volume Pedal. Micro.
Inputs: Stereo headphone. Micro jack.
Computer: PC/Mac host Interface.
Amplification: New 2x22W RMS Stereo 2 ways amplifi cation. Speaker On/Off switch.
Optionals: VIDEO INTERFACE (Systems : PAL, NTSC, Super VHS. Monitor, Mirror, Zoom, Karaoke). VOCALIZER (Harmonizer, Vocoder, Melody types, Midi Vocalizer track, Vocalizer to Arranger, Vocal effects) HARD DISK (Type ATA IDE 2.5. 6G min) PATTERN EXPANSION (2 Mbyte). FOOTSWITCH (6 or 13 switches)
Dimensions: 115 x 39 x 12,5 cms (46 x 15.6 x 5 inches).
Weight: 17 Kg. (37.4 lbs)

Listen to a demo/sample played on this instrument.

Sample 1