I just came home from my first day at NAMM. Here is what I saw today.

From Roland, the new G-70M music workstation will arrive in my store this month with a Retail Price of $3,999.00 and a map price of $3495.00. I had a lengthy discussion with members of the Italian Design team and 2 of Roland's Japan design team regarding all the posts here at the Synthzone from members who have posted their findings so far regarding sounds and styles and you can trust me that Roland is listening to all the comments both good and negative and are willing to make changes and additions as needed.

Next, the the GW7 Roland is really interesting. It is a 61 key arranger keyboard at $799.00 list and $699.00 map and it has some new features for Roland. First, there are many world and ethnic styles including Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern. There is an Indian drum kit, an Arabic drum kit and several other ethnic drum kits. Although you can't edit styles, you can load styles into flash ram and for middle eastern customers, there are many authentic middle eastern istruments and quarter tone tuning. There is also a 16 track sequencer, USB for transferring styles and SMF songs, D Beam, over 850 Tones, 39 drum kits, 128 user performances. 64 voice polyphony. There are 101 styles and memory locations for 99 more which you can load in. This should be a good value keyboard.

The RD300SX and RD700SX digital pianos are very good. The 300 will map at $1395.00 and the 700 at $2195.00.

Roland has come out with a new BR-1200CD recording studio at a price of $799.00 list and $699.00 map which is now their lowest price machine with a built in CD burner.

The CD-2 two track Compact Flash/ CD recorder will list at $799.00 and map at $695.00. You get direct to CD recording or to compact flash which can then be mastered with effects and then burned to CD. Built in stereo microphone and speaker for audio capture and playback. Inputs for instruments and microphones and onboard pro-quality effects.

New from Generalmusic is a Genesys Pro Oriental which should really excite those needing a top of the line middle eastern keybaord. New inside this instrument is a new cpu board which can accomodate up to 64 MB of sample memory. This is much improved from the 16 MB in the current model. Also, there will be 128 middle eastern styles and 128 international styles and there will be 64 really well done middle eastern voices. I got to hear this product for some time and I really liked what I heard. Generalmusic has also put the single joy stick type controller on board rather than the two wheels. Quarter tone tuning can be assigned to the right hand, left hand or both and they have also included Portamento and Glissando capabilities.
A 20 GB hard drive is standard, up from the 3 GB currently used. The price for this new model will be the same as the current Genesys PRO.

I also saw the new WK2000oriental which replaces the WK2oriental. It now is silver in color and includes a bank of Iranian styles, more middle eastern arabic styles and has a larger ROM base of voices. The price of this model should be around $1795.00.

Yamaha, as I already knew, only showed two new low end models, but talk of the new Tyros was kept pretty quiet except for the release date to be later this year. Nothing was found out as to what new and different features will be available on this product.

Ketron had no new arranger products at this show . AJ took me through the MidJay with more detail and he was using an almost completed Version 2.0 software revision. I also got to see his notes for the final owners manual but it is not quite done yet.

I didn't make it to Korg today and so I have nothing to report as to any new products in the arranger market until this weekend. I will be going to my store tomorrow and Saturday and returning to NAMM on Sunday.


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George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California