"I have a few different drum CD-ROMs I use in my Kurzweil, one of which is the excellent Sweetwater Stereo Session Drums. Of the ones that use primarily stereo samples, your Session Drum disc is the only one that doesn't cut off cymbal decays when I play it from my Trap Kat. On the others I always have to go in and remove certain notes from the sequence to have things decay properly. I assume this is related to polyphony, but why do your stereo samples seem to be better able to overcome the problem?"

It's a secret. I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you. But seriously folks, we've seen this type of question come up before and we are happy that people are starting to notice this difference. You are right, it is a polyphony issue. When you load up a kit in which all of the drums are stereo samples and they all ring out for five or more seconds of unlooped decay you are going to use up a lot of notes, especially if you have a roll or something like that. We were one of the first to do all stereo samples with full decays with our Drum CD, and we noticed this problem in the early stages of development.

Here's the deal (and a bit of history). Back when Ray Kurzweil was developing the original K250 it was extremely costly and technically difficult to have very many voices (notes of polyphony) available. Most people are amazed when they discover that the K250 had only 12 notes of polyphony. Its piano sound was (and is) legendary, and to think it was done with a tiny fraction of the memory such sounds use today, and could be musically played with only 12 notes sounding at a time was a tribute to Ray's genius. He and his team knew that in order to be able to pull it off they would have to develop a way for the machine to 'steal' notes without it being apparent in a performance. The system they developed was very sophisticated and was the basis of the technology they still use today. Kurzweil unquestionably has the best voice-stealing algorithm of any keyboard around, which is why a 48-voice K2600 can run with any 64-voice machine out there under most circumstances.

Any sounds played on a Kurzweil will benefit from this technology, but it's also possible to go in and tweak the 'stealer-priority' of individual notes (drums in this case) to optimize the performance for certain applications and circumstances. The methods for doing this go well beyond the scope of inSync, but suffice it to say our Soundware team spent days and weeks handcrafting the priority of every single drum in our entire Total Stereo Drum CD to ensure they would behave well in the context of playing a kit.