Forte SE was good enough as a stage piano – best sound engine, sufficient number of programs, sound parameters editing with the front panel and with the software. There is much more and you can read about it visiting Forte SE page on our website.

In pursuit of featuring more Gigabytes, more presets, more everything else Kurzweil doesn’t chase the tail (neither of the ranking list nor its own). Anyway you can’t make a small screen big easily that’s why we got other things to be happy with: new sound programs including multitimbral – now there are 512 individual programs which is 190 programs more than older models (Forte/Forte 7) offered; plus there are 182 Multi programs – the same number the older models comprise. The number of effects slots was increased – now there are 32 of them for the whole Forte line (though 16 seemed enough). Another crucial improvement – 188MB of non-volatile flash memory for user samples. Of course it’s far from 3,3GB but at least it’s something.

The company assures that there are other improvements as well but we won’t be able to find out about it until we download the new official firmware and upload it into the synth.

So the huge uncoverable difference between Forte SE and Forte 7/8 is in the capability of the older models to operate with a bigger amount of custom samples using Flash Play technology – 16 vs 2 GB – and in the number of user presets which is 3 times higher than that in Forte SE, although 1000 presets are quite enough already. And of course there is another problem – a monochrome display with a small resolution which is not a good feature for such an instrument. If you need Favorites function, well, it migh become an issue too – Forte SE offers 10 while Forte 7/8 – 50. The number of arpeggiators is twice smaller in Forte SE but for a stage piano it’s not vital.