Having played a VA-7 and various Yamaha PSR's and now owning the Tyros, I found Rolands keyboards were great for clean cut modern synthy pop and dance styles, but a bit brash for other genres. I found many of the orchestral patches on Roland rather cold, though the strings and synth patches are always the creme a la creme. The drum sounds are plentiful though, but the style arranger section is severely limited. With only 2 variations and intro/ending, simple fills it didn't inspire me. I have never looked to see if its possible to actually create styles on a Roland EM series, I guess probably not but they do sound kinda different than yamaha's well orchestrated backings. If anything yamaha's styles can sometimes be too musical, whilst rolands are a bit more plain and easy to fit into.
Rolands internal speakers are rather poor though and a good audition should be done either on cans or a decent set of monitors. I agree that the 64 note poly is a big plus, but I also suggest this person looks at the PSR2000 - there's not much difference now in prices and you get a whole lot more!

Regards
Simon



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Simon G.K. Williams
simon@svpworld.com
Creative Music & Multimedia
http://www.svpworld.com
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