Hi all,

I just got my GW 8E 2 days ago and on first impressions I cant believe how much keyboard you get for the price!

KEYFEEL – AWESOME! Nearly on par with my Motif XS and the Roland Fantom G. honestly it’s a great keyfeel – very high quality keybed for such a low end price range keyboard.

BUILD QUALITY - is very nice and tight, the buttons feel great and the analogue control knobs are fantastic. They feel exactly the same as my Motif XS. Very stiff, they aren’t flimsy or anything. I remember the knobs on the Yamaha MM6 and they felt like toys compared to this GW-8.

SCREEN – the screen does everything you need, a simple black and white screen with large characters. Its easy to read, its wide view can display the entire 8 tracks spread out with out having to squash everything together.

NAVIGATION – all I can say its I haven’t even read a single page of the manual except for a few quick references and I already know how to do pretty much anything on this board. Its so intuitive and easy to use.

The sound and rhythm categories are great, the effects menus are superb. I cant believe some of the effects it has and how good they sound. IT HAS A SLICE EFFECT!! For me that’s amazing it basically allows u to created arpeggiated voices and u can even create the patterns in extreme details… so a lot of the arps on my motif XS can be achieved using this SLICE effect on the GW-8.

Reverbs, Delays, and the rest are top class!

DRUMS – hands now cannot ask for anything more. They are Punchy, crisp and in your face. They are all very usable and also very unique between samples.

Everytime I play on this keyboard I just cant stop saying to myself - Cant believe I got this board for this price!!!

The physical size also – its so small and portable, when u carry it under one arm u think u are carrying a cheap casio board cos of the weight. Its thin, it isn’t deep but it has everything you need.

SOUND QUALITY:
I am using it through the Logitech THX Z2300 speakers and the sound is phenomenal! If only this thing had the mega voice technology or more multi layered guitars the backing tracks would be far more polished but still its good enough for live gigging and still sounds good.

Every sound category is there with many different options. I really cant find many weaknesses other than my original point about the guitars not having enough samples with the velocity range.

STYLES:
A lot of the styles possibly have too much. I am currently muting about 3 tracks in each style as they sound too busy or the accompaniment parts simply don’t fit the songs I am playing (no biggy). The style variety is great, my board comes with the E style set, one thing I want to know is if u can download the styles that come with L (Latin) version as that is my preference for the music I choose to play.

Using the styles is simple, the buttons are laid out very well and everything is easily accessed on the fly. I do wish this board had dedicated part mute and solo buttons for the 8 style parts. That is one thing it misses. Then again you can work around that by saving the variations into performances which are easily accessed on the right hand side just like the other high end arrangers.


My Biggest Drawback – I mentioned this above but the main thing I would point out that I thought was weak is that some of the voices especially acoustic guitars lack in the multisampling through the 0-127 velocity range

It’s just basically 2 samples for the entire velocity range as opposed to about 4 or 5 on the Yamahas that I have played on.

The funny thing is one of the acoustic guitar voices actually has the automatic fret slides that u get on the SA Concert Guitar on the Tyros 2. Annoying according to some people but it doesn’t seem to bother me at all.

I haven’t trying to convert any styles yet or set up the PC software.

I have tried song recording or the mp3 voice cut function and hope to explore this soon.

To sum up the GW-8 I would say:
- Simple, Straight forward arranger that does the basics plus a lot more
- Extremely portable
- Quality sounds and styles on par with high end boards at a third of the price.

thanks for reading
Nick