As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. In my last post in my Kronos Chronicles (links to other posts above), I mentioned that when playing in bright sunlight, the LCD touchscreen is pretty close to impossible to see. Moving the 2nd tier keyboard helped, but it’s not ideal. I looked on the interwebs for solutions, and at least feel better knowing that I’m not the only one who has the same problem. Some folks have come up with some pretty interesting solutions.
I wanted something a bit more … polished? … so I took matters into my own hands, and first mocked up something with some scraps of black Fomecore. Once I had shape I liked, I made something that actually does double duty out of some black Coroplast, gaff tape, and Velcro.
I wasn’t thrilled about sticking Velcro to my “baby” but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, so I put the fuzzy loops along three sides of the screen. The hooks were are on the back and side edges of the shield. When not in use, the shield folds flat and covers the screen, so it’s protected when it’s in the bag. With the 2nd tier keyboard in place, the shield is barely noticeable. It ain’t beautiful, but I think it will do the trick when I need it to.
I also noted that moving songs around in a set list can be a little clunky, and that’s still the case, even after I’ve worked with it a bit more. One thing I didn’t think about is that there are well over 400 songs in my “book” and a setlist only holds a maximum of 128. So, I can’t hold all of the songs in a single setlist. This may not be a big problem, unless I have to go way off the setlist for a request or when a band member “calls an audible” and the song’s not in the current setlist. And, I still find editing setlists clunky. At some point, I’m going to contact a couple of other Kronos users who I know have a lot of changes in their sets to see how they manage it.
I did get some feedback about switching between sounds within a combi, and it was suggested that I might want to use the sliders as channel faders to mix between the sounds, or maybe repurpose the vector joystick for that use. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to fool with that yet.
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