I currently own and gig a Roland VA-76 arranger.

It is generally a pretty poor effort, having old and tired sounds and extremely primitive styles. It also has such a poor control layout that it is unusable as a normal arranger, in my opinion.

However, it has one feature that caused me to choose it over anything else available at the time. This feature concerns it's abilities when set up to use midifiles as backing tracks, together with live keyboard parts.

Basically, what it does is to enable me to create a full set up of manual keyboard parts, together with splits, layers and effects etc and store this as a "user panel preset patch" (a "Performance" in Roland speak, or an "Arrangement" in Korg i-series language) - for instant recall later.

So far, this is pretty much what any arranger will do. This difference comes when you are then able to additionally store a link to an on-disc midifile into these patches. So, when you recall a "user panel preset patch", you get all your two-handed manual play keyboard settings, plus instant recall of the relevant midifile, which then instantly plays direct from disc at the kick of a footswitch.

As there are 64 storable "user panel preset patches" on the instrument, this means that I can have up to 64 of these "midifile + live parts" patches set up. Enough for any gig with reloading anything.

Other than the older Roland G-1000, I don't know of any non-Roland arrangers that will do this, but I think the PA1X just might.

I have owned a couple of older Korgs, the i3 and the i30. I liked the sound of these much better than the Roland, and they were great as on-the-fly arrangers (the i3 particularly)but they lacked anything like this ability with midifiles. You could maybe set them for a single non-split keyboard part to play over a midifile, but not much beyond that, and the results were not storable either.

What I want to know is whether or not the PA1X can acheive this result, even if it goes about it via different method. Could be that the "one-touch" settings are heading this way, but I could use some advice from an experienced PA1X owner.

What I am after is to set the instrument up so that, for my next song on stage, I just call up the appropriate "patch" and hit GO, and keep doing this for the entire gig. Thus 10 slot pre-load style sequencers are out, which is the way Korg used to do it. Similarly, play from disk - but won't save the keyboard settings with the file - systems won't do either.

I am particularly interested in the Korg because, even though the new Roland G-70 is a definite step in the right direction and will undoubtedly have this feature, I have a strong preference for Korg sounds and styles compared with those from Roland.

Any guidance would be appreciated