As I had mentioned in one of the other posts, I bought the G70 last weekend. Before anyone starts speculating about the steep learning curve or suspecting that Roland instruments eat their owners alive , I will tell you that disappointingly, I had to go out of town last week, and have been away from both my keyboard and internet until coming home this weekend.

However, now that I have had a few hours with the G70, I am happy to say that compared to the G1000 (which I still have after 8 years) it is an improvement in every area.

It does have a lot of features, but to me the Operating System is quite well thought out, and makes it easy and intuitive to get around (though IMO Yamaha may be easier by a notch). To my ears the sound is great , and the styles sound good too (this is my subjective opinion). I am yet to transfer my custom styles and performances from the G1K, but so far the built-ini styles cover most major genres. I like having a flash card instead of a hard disk - more reliable and less affected by the rigors of moving the instrument around - and am about to by a 4 GB card. There are larger ones out there, but 4GB seems to be the most cost-effective size, and since the G70 does not store audio data, but only MIDI and text information for songs and styles, this should be more than sufficient to accommodate my entire collection of MIDI files and styles, with plenty of room to spare.

The built-in styles cover a large variety of genres, and although I have some work ahead of me in setting up the associated one-touch presets for my taste, if I had to play a gig tonight, I probably would take the G70 instead of the tried and true G1000.

I love the vocal harmonizer. I am not much of a singer, but it really helps me sound better. I have played with the Digitech Vocalist Workstation some years ago, and must say that the built-in one sound much better and is easier to use.

I will have more comments about the things I like, find interesting or odd, or dislike (yes, I do have some pet peeves about it too) in the coming weeks.

Nonetheless, overall I am very happy with buying the G70. I feel that it will improve my ability to entertain my audiences better.

Regards,
Alex

[This message has been edited by Alex K (edited 08-05-2006).]

[This message has been edited by Alex K (edited 08-05-2006).]