Wersi Abacus

A members review

Johns verdict on the keyboard from Wersi.

How long have you had the Wersi Abacus? I bought in in February 2003.

How long have you been playing.

I started tinkering on a chord organ about 30 years ago, nearly always had a keyboard or organ in the house but never made much progress, then I got involved with the keyboard club and never looked back.

Do you only play for yourself, play in front of friends, play in public, semi professional etc.
I tend to play mainly for my own amusement, I play at the club charity concerts but that is about it.

What type of music do you enjoy most.
I enjoy listening to light classics and just about anything played on any sort of organ, being a dancer I enjoy most ballroom and Latin music. I enjoy playing Latin, anything slow enough for me to play well and most music with a bit of feeling.

What is your favorite sound, orchestral, theatre organ, pipe organ, big band, piano etc.
Pretty much across the board really, my music collection includes everything from brass band, through all sorts of organ to pure synthesizer.

About the Wersi Abacus.

Was there any particular feature that made you select the Wersi Abacus. Owning a Wersi was always my dream, and once I had a chance to play one the feel of the keyboard had me hooked.

Is there anything on the Wersi Abacus you didn't have on your last one. Lots, mainly the real draw bars but it would be quite a list to include everything.

Is there anything you had on your last instrument you wish you had on Wersi Abacus.
When I am feeling lazy I think one-touch settings would be nice, but for my favorite tunes I used my own pre-sets on my last instrument, and that had one touch play.

What are your favorite sounds on this instrument.
The drawbars get used a lot, as does Mantovani strings, and the Diatonisch 1 accordion, trumpet and clarinet.

What are your favorite rhythms on this instrument.
I use the Bossa Nova at different tempo for all sorts of music, the Langs Walzer 2 is very nice and I use sweet beat quite a bit as well. My collection of rhythms grows pretty much on a weekly basis as there are loads to be down loaded from the Internet.

Has this instrument helped improve your playing. Do you feel more confident playing this instrument.
Having a real keyboard under your fingers is bound to improve your playing. Not sure about confidence, I am getting used to the instrument, it does so much more than my last one and it was a couple of years before I was confident hitting buttons on that.

What instrument did you have before this one, and do you still have it and play it.
I had a Yamaha PSR 8000, I sold it to my father so still get to play it.

General comments.

As a portable instrument it is luggable rather than portable, it is quite bulky and very heavy.
I find the sound superb and quite often get carried away and put the loud pedal down a bit too much, the wife keeps me in order so I don't get in trouble with the neighbors.
I am looking forward to the next version of the software so I will have more features to play with.

About the Wersi Abacus

The Wersi Abacus is certainly different, at its heart is a full blown computer, on the back are ports for printer, mouse and QWERTY keyboard and as the Abacus runs on Windows XP and has Windows note pad installed you can type a letter and print it with the instrument.
Wersi started out as self build instruments many years ago, today there are still people out there who spend an awful lot of time taking their new Wersi instrument apart and trying to improve it by adding faster disk drives, more memory and cooling fans, there are web sites that talk about nothing else, this is quite sad really as what they are designed for is making music and they already do that very well.
What you can do is customize the instruments sounds so you have your own very individual instrument. The sounds loaded when you get it are excellent but everyone has their own taste in sound, and this is one of the Wersi Abacus's strengths, you can install new sounds from Aki, and they have more than enough to satisfy everyone.

First impressions are of course very important, once the Wersi Abacus is turned on the first thing to catch you eye is the large screen in the middle of the keyboard. This is not just a visual aid, it is touch sensitive and you use it to control all sorts of functions.
To go through all the functions available from the screen would take an entire web site on their own, this article is about playing the Wersi Abacus and to do that you need to understand the basic functions, and they are very basic if all you want to do is play. The screen shows a set of steps going up from left to right, the first step shows the base line instrument selected, the second step has two blocks these are the two lower or left hand sounds, the next step has three blocks, these are the upper or right hand sounds.
Why the reference to left and lower and right and upper sounds? The answer is because you can plug in a second lower keyboard and without any changes to the instrument set up have a two manual keyboard, you can also add pedals, either spinet or full pedal board.
At the bottom of the screen are nine buttons, in the picture it shows level 1, you can have five levels of buttons giving 45 buttons per screen, the buttons are selected by touching the screen on the button.
The screen changes dep[ending on the panel button pressed, if you have pressed the Waltz button the screen buttons will normally show a selection of waltzes why normally? Because the buttons are customizable, if you never play to a waltz accompaniment you can change the the style behind the button. This is also true for sounds, each sound button on the panel gives access to up to 45 sounds on the screen.

There are one hundred and thirteen buttons on the Wersi Abacus, it looks complicated but is actually very easy to use.
Starting on the left just above the 3.5" disk drive are the accompaniment controls. The top four buttons are variation controls, A,B,C or D,
down a level are intro and endings 1 & 2, with rotor fast & slow all on its own. Bottom of this section are from right to left, start/stop, synchro start, fill 2 and fill 1.
In common with all the control buttons on the Wersi Abacus each one has a little light that indicates when it is selected, the start stop flashes in time with the beat.
Just above this set of buttons are the pitch bend and modulation wheels.
This is quite a nice grouping that puts key controls ready to hand.

There are six effects buttons to the very left of the control buttons, of all the buttons these are probably the least best placed, if you want a sound effect quickly it is a bit of a stretch.
Then there are fourteen rhythm style buttons, each with up to 45 styles.
Below these are another row of rhythm controls. From left to right, Accompaniment On/Off, Piano mode, Auto Variation, Auto Base, Manual drums and Fade in/out. Aesthetically the layout is ordered, ergonomically a bit more space round the fade button is desirable.
We then come to three banks of buttons that control the voices, first the pedal voices. There are three buttons, the bottom one is marked select, press this and it lights up, you can then select any voice using the buttons on the right side of the keyboard, there are special bass voices designed for use with the pedals but you are not limited to these. The middle button turns the dynamic (touch) on and off and the top button is the octave shift, two up and two down.
The next bank of buttons controls the lower or left hand section of the keyboard. At the bottom you have two select buttons, 1 and two, use these buttons when selecting any of the voices in the instrument. First press the select button then the make your selection from the sounds available.
The middle row has chorus, to turn the chorus effect on or off for each voice selected in conjunction with the select button and Lower 2 on, this allows you to turn voice 2 on the lower manual on or off, voice 1 is always on, you can shut it up by turning the volume down but more about that later.
The top row has octave, two up and two down for each of the two voices, and hold lower, the notes on the lower manual carry on playing even after you have taken you hand away.
The next block has nine buttons controlling the upper or right hand part of the keyboard. Along the bottom are the three select buttons for the three voices available, again use these to select voices from those available.
The middle buttons have chorus, turn the chorus effect on or off for each voice in conjunction with the select button. then upper 2 and upper 3, these turn on or off voices 2 and 3, voice one is always on.
The top row has octave, again two up and two down for each voice, dynamic (touch) for each voice and Wersi Chord. In OAS version 6 there are fourteen different variations of automatic Wersi chord, in the humble opinion of the writer if there was ever a good reason to learn to play block chords with the right hand then these are it.
The last block on this side of the keyboard consists of twelve buttons, 10 presets and two bank shift. A preset can be set to change a single voice or just about the whole keyboard, setting is very easy, once the keyboard is set up to your liking press and hold down the preset button you want to assign, a new screen appears where you set the details you want to save, you can also select a different button to the one you pressed. The first 50 presets are protected and have factory settings in them, a sort of easy set up for when you are getting used to the instrument, the still leaves 950 for you and you can save this group to a back up and then start all over again and again until you have filled up your internal hard drive. There are fourteen attributes you can select to save the status of, and as each attribute can have a number of settings configured elsewhere this makes the presets very powerful.
The power of the presets is such that you can quickly loose track of what you have done, a simple trick to ensuring a smooth transition between the presets is to finish setting one then when you are happy with that one copy it to the next button, that way you will have no nasty surprises caused by sudden changes in setup.
Recalling a preset is as simple as pressing the button, but with a thousand presets getting the right bank of buttons is a little more complicated but still quite straight forward, from OAS V6 the dark bar running horizontally across the screen just below mid point is the quick access bar, tapping the screen on this bar will open a new screen with a full list of saved presets they can be called up by number or picked from the list, you can save them under categories to make searching easier.
Between the control buttons and the keyboard on the left of the instrument are the volume controls, these are separate from the master control, each control is a slider, pull it out and the sound gets louder, push it in and it gets quieter, all the way in and you have no sound at all. The first seven sliders control accompaniment, from left to right song controls the volume of the CD or track being played from disk. Drums controls the drums, what else, the next five control the parts of the accompaniment, bass is obvious, each accompaniment also has four parts that can be controled using the sliders. Anyone who has watched Bret Wales in concert and wondered what he was adjusting it is these sliders bringing in or taking out parts of the accompaniment, just another thing to remember while playing.
Lower 1 & 2 and Upper 1,2 & 3 control the volume of the voices.
All of these volume settings can be stored in the presets.
So the left hand side of the Wersi Abacus looks after the accompaniment, selecting it, starting and stopping, changing the volume and then there are the presets, modulation and pitch bend wheel and finally rotor fast/slow. should be enough their to keep the left hand busy.
Now to the right hand side of the instrument, this is much easier. First right alongside the screen is the little contrast control for the screen, next to this little control is the much bigger wheel, if you don't have any selection windows open then this controls the tempo, including the real drums from OAS version 6 on. If you have a selection window open it is used to scroll up and down the selection list.
Below the big wheel are the transposer buttons, down, up and normal.
Now we come to the sounds, the first bank of buttons are all about organ sounds, the top two allow you to select the organ sound, the left of the two opens up the main screen, the top left of the nine sound buttons on the screen is the Organ Drawbars 1, when you select this you are using the drawbars on the right hand side,and the B-Organ voice. now this is a strange feature on the Wersi Abacus, and maybe other Wersi instruments, from the factory this is the only organ voice that uses the live drawbars, yet there are other organ voices (H-Organ, Digital and analoge) that can be set up to use the drawbars.
Actually setting up the other voices is quite straight forward and you can quickly have three more organ voices on the drawbars.
The right of these two buttons has more organ voices including classicle pipe and theatre voices. For some strange reason there are more organ voices hidden away under the Zither and Mouth Organ buttons.
From OAS V5 each and every sound selection button can have five banks of nine buttons on it so you have plenty of room to store your favorite voices.
The way the sounds are allocated to buttons is called mapping, the same is true for the rhythms, if you only want to play organ you can re map every sound button and only have organ sounds.
Below the two organ selection buttons are the Percussion and Sustain buttons for the organ sounds, the bottom two buttons control Rotor effect and vibrato effect.
The next six blocks of buttons are set in sound type groups, Percussion has piano, both electric and normal, vibraphone etc. and guitar, the only one I am aware you hit is the Vibraphone but that is the logic of Wersi.
Ensemble has the strings, orchestra and vocal voices. Brass has trumpet etc, but also has clarinet, sax and pan pipe?
Traditional has everything that didn't fit in the previous sections. Nearly last is the Synthesizer sounds and finally the dedicated pedal voices.
As with all instruments what some people like others think are terrible, for that reason it is suggested you go and play one of the Wersi range, they all have the same sound generators and samples so what you hear on one will be the same on the others.
As already mentioned the Wersi range will happily accept Aki sound samples (the samples have to be in the right format so check before you part with your cash). The Blackpool Tower Ballroom Wurlitzer has recently been sampled (2005) and having heard the samples played by Chris Hopkins in concert they are well worth having, if a bit expensive if reports are to be believed.
To the far right is the on off button, this used to be a touch it and the instrument powered off, from OAS V6 this has been changed, touching this button now brings up a pop up box on the screen so you can confirm you do actually want to switch off. Because the Wersi range have a computer at their heart powering on and off takes a bit longer than most players are used to but that is the price you pay for a great sound and extreme flexibility.
Below the buttons on the right hand side are the draw bars, nine for the upper manual and seven for the lower. Each drawbar controls the volume of a given footage of virtual pipe, just like the Hammond organ.
As already mentioned one voice is set up but others are available. One of the drawbacks of the drawbars is you can not save the settings directly to a preset, you have to save the setting to a new voice then save that voice in the preset, a bit more effort but the same result, it also means that setting is available for other presets without having to create the exact drawbar settings again.
Now to playing the Wersi Abacus, anyone buying an instrument that costs as much as these wants to spend as long playing it as possible, that means the keyboard should feel nice and in this area Wersi are superb, the keys have a wonderful feel to them.
The keys are of course touch sensitive, there are fourteen different touch settings, these include reverse, the harder you hit the key the softer the sound, and random, why?
A lot of the voices also have after touch, the voice changes subtly if you press the key harder after the initial press.
Dropping to floor level you can of course have a pedal board, a pedal board with foot buttons to control special features, and of course the swell pedal.
The swell pedal deserves a special mention as it is programmable by voice, you can have one voice loudest with the pedal all the way up and at the same time another voice loudest with the pedal all the way down, you can then switch quickly between voices simply by moving the swell pedal up and down. Another use for this is to set one voice to maximum with the pedal a third of the way down, a second voice to start at a third and reach maximum at two thirds and then a third voice to come in at two thirds and reach maximum at full depression, this allows you to bring in voices depending on how far down the swell pedal is pressed.
It is hoped this article will encourage you to have a go at playing a Wersi instrument, while this is specific to the Wersi Abacus all the Wersi instruments using the Open Art System work the same, it is just the layout and number of buttons that is different.
Mentioning the Open Art System leads on to what is really the heart of the Wersi range, to go into any depth would require a full web site on its own, the number of parameters that can be changed is vast, for the technically minded the opportunities are immense, for those that just want to play the above is all you need to be able to find your way round and start making music.

Subscribe to wersi-oas-styles
Powered by launch.groups.yahoo.com

Why not come along to a Basildon Keyboard Club Concert, you will be made very welcome, have a great evenings entertainment, a complimentary cup of tea or coffee with biscuits and of course experience the delights of live music played on top of the range electronic organs & keyboards by the best players.