Saturday, May 11, 2019

The Manual's Manual


I have a new manual for my Korg Liverpool.
These days when you buy a complicated bit of tech there is often a 'Getting Started' guide and not much else in the way of documentation. Somewhere in the guide there will be a printed link to download a full owner's manual so that you may explore further the advanced options when you hit a brick wall. This is great for the environment. Who needs 100 plus pages of something you're unlikely to study in depth. On the odd occasion you actually do need that much information, prolonged perusing isn't that great on electronic devices, at least not in my experience. Post-It notes just don't cut it on a screen.
There's an upside and downside to PDF documents. On the upside you can print only the pages you need and this can be done at home. The downside is that should you actually need the whole document it's probably going to be costly.
The latter was my predicament. I needed the complete Korg Liverpool Owner's Manual and at 246 pages long my printer was going to be burned out by the end of the process.
So it was that I ended up calling a professional printer. I've used John E Wright in the past and they're very good. When I asked about next day printing they said it wouldn't be a problem. I specified what I needed and sent the instructions with the file. As you can see from the picture above, it's all done. You'll also notice that it's bound. I was informed in the original call that if the manual was bound it would be VAT free, something I didn't know. All in all it cost me a little over £20 and is worth every penny.
Now that I have the manual I've realised that while in depth at 246 pages it does need some simplification so I'm writing a concise version while I'm reading through it. I'll be able to cross reference with the original while providing myself with a memory jolt for the plethora of procedures that I'll be performing. I'm hoping that by the time I'm done with this little exercise I'll be at the expert level I want to be at.
I'm also planning on passing on my knowledge to help other Korg Liverpool owners. At the moment there doesn't seem to be much information on the advanced synthesiser functions of the keyboard.
I want to change that.

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