It might be a bit early for spring cleaning, but this procedure was long overdue. Ten years or so ago, my old Kawai K1’s battery was exhausted, so I replaced it. As far as I remember, it didn’t come with a socket, so I’ve soldered one in with the new battery alongside (you will need a CR2023 3V Lithium battery). Years came and went, my K1 was collecting dust, waiting unused for its time to come back, which happened three years ago, or so. It worked nicely as MIDI keyboard, and only recently I thought by myself: why not making it a fully-working synth again? I finally did it, and the story doesn’t stop here.
After a bit of research, I learned that Kawai is still hosting the sound banks for its old synths. Here’s their treasure trove, search for “K-1”. It’s not only the standard sound bank that came with each K1 (or K1m or K1-II) but all other banks offered by Kawai some decades ago, too. The “K-1 Libraries” document gives an overview: you’ll get the sounds of sound cards A101 – A105, A200, E101, E102, J101 – J103. That’s a whopping 768 single patches and 384 multi patches for you to play at no cost. Well, thank you, Kawai!
The next question is how to get all these patches into your synthesizer, because the times where you used your Atari ST and a nifty sound editor for uploading are long gone. There’s a readme in the sound bank’s zip file on certain settings you have to do on the K1 side (like allowing to overwrite content). But how do you upload these sounds?
Now you might have the idea to start an Atari ST emulator and try your best, but let’s not get too nerdy here. There’s a solution for this. If you happen to be a Mac user, you can use the SysEx Librarian. It’s open source and free to download and use.
The software is easy to use: just load your midi files into it (I’ve taken the smf files with sysex data included) and upload them by hitting the play button. There’s similar software for other systems, too, like MIDI OX for Windows and Rosegarden for Linux that will do the same job.
And that’s it. Get ready for some sounds of my revitalized K1 in the near future.
