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JIAYING
Z4941 - electronic musical instrument
full polyphonic analogue keyboard with nice accompaniment

This obscure Chinese midsize keyboard may be a far relative of the wonderful Ramasio 892, like this it is full polyphonic with monophonic piano envelope - a technology that established brand companies abandoned already in the beginning of 1980th and that they never used in midsize keyboards.

Like Ramasio 892 it has nicely warm squarewave- based analogue timbres and also the 6 rhythms have a lovely trashy analogue home organ appeal. E.g. the white noise "open hihat" hisses always 1 step long, no matter how slow the tempo is set, which makes it rather sound like the hiss of a pneumatic air valve. Interesting is the nicely warm full polyphonic fingered chord accompaniment, which responds so rapidly that it even accepts trilled notes and not only plays non- chords but even weird grunting cluster patterns. But unlike 892 the accompaniment patterns are rather simple and more like Antonelli Star 2379.

(Note: This keyboard sounds great, but don't buy one of these so far your only intention is to get a keyboard with faithfully imitated natural instrument sounds. Remember, this is a squarewave keyboard those timbres sound not remotely like what is written on its switches, though bought with wrong expectation it may disappoint you. Also the monophonic envelope behaves very different from normal polyphonic keyboards.)
 
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This keyboard seems to be ultra-rare; I never saw any other specimen, nor any other instruments made by "Jiaying". However I guess that they later renamed this company into Jiayin, which was one of the distributors of the absurdly bad Yongmei transistor tooters (see Golden Camel-7A).

main features:



eastereggs:

notes:

The case design of this instrument looks like a cross between Testron CL-60910 and a mid 1980th Yamaha PortaSound (see Yamaha PCS-30). But the slider levers protrude 2mm too high, which makes them feel wacky, and also the scale marks at the slide potentiometers do not match their motion range. The keys are a little longer than average midsize keys; they seem to be spring loaded and also feel a little wacky. Like with MC-2 hardware (see Fujiyama KS-37) the power LED flashes as tempo LED during rhythm. Like in Ramasio 892 the PCB contains much analogue stuff without percussion trimmers and employs a keyboard matrix for the piano keys, but unlike there it has only a single chip CPU which is no COB. The printing on small ICs and some discrete components look very smeared, like when they belong to the first ICs ever made in China. When I bought it on eBay, it first didn't work at all because one of the many sloppy solder joints (bridging a jumper with rosinless solder?) was broken. However this Jiaying keyboard is still built by magnitudes better than the horrible transistor tooters those later came out under the name "Jiayin" (see here). Despite the AC-adapter jack is rated for 12 to 15V, the instrument works well already at about 9V, thus I recommend to operate it at this voltage to avoid unnecessary overheat of the electronics. (I haven't analyzed the hardware further yet.)

The main voice is made from squarewave with monophonic volume envelope and sounds pleasantly warm and bassy. The timbres "piccolo", "trumpet", "flute" (slow attack phase like a pipe organ). "piccolo" is muffled plain squarewave (like a clarinet). "trumpet" has a narrower pulse width but sounds more like a slightly thin and dull reed organ than brassy. "flute" is a fatter variant of it. "string" has a slower attack and also reminds to a reed organ. The "piano" is made from the "flute" timbre with percussive monophonic decay envelope. It sounds more realistic than on Ramasio 892, but due to the envelope is monophonic, the tones of all currently held keys sound again at full volume as soon a new key is pressed. "harpsichord" is the same in brighter, using the "string" timbre. The vibrato switch adds a 6Hz vibrato (also affects chord voice) and the sustain switch adds a percussive but very long decaying (about 10s?) monophonic sustain. After power on the first main voice note often begins with a loud popping noise (likely by an empty capacitor). Moving the preset sound slide switch with held notes mutes the main voice during intermediate positions and sounds a popping noise when a new preset sound is reached.

The analogue percussion is of typical old home organ style. Base and tom knock quite dull. The hihats are made from transistor noise. Unusual is that the "open hihat" hisses always 1 step long, no matter how slow the tempo is set, which in slow rhythms makes it rather sound like the hiss of a pneumatic air valve. The tempo can be steplessly adjusted between very slow and quite fast; however the "swing" rhythm is slower than others and thus can be only cranked up to medium tempo.

The chord voice of manual chord and accompaniment is made from plain squarewave with a small dose of sustain. The full polyphonic accompaniment is of the same ancient type like with Antonelli Star 2379. It chops the chord voice simply into a staccato and there is an additional warm and dull analogue e-bass voice that toggles between the note of the lowest and highest held chord section key. The accompaniment responds fast enough to trill chord notes, but unfortunately chord memory can not be turned off, thus chord notes stay always held after key release, which prevents clever play tricks. With rhythm off there is a manual chord mode.

Question: Does anybody know other keyboards made by Jiaying (not Jiayin)?
 

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