Just got a Juno stage for the holidays, and I'm a bit confused as to what to do with it. I've had yamaha keyboards in the past, and have been very used to their auto accompaniment/arranger functionality. I produce dance/trance/techno/house tracks in my spare time, and once in a while I like to perform "live" for friends/small get-togethers, and I'm just trying to think how the Juno Stage will fit into that.

I can see it as a good:

- Patch synth. From what I've seen it has some nice patches and plenty of layering/fx. I'm sure I can get some pretty good trance leads out of this thing.
- Arpeggiator is a dead ringer for most dance songs
- Seems like a good Midi controller
- Keys feel great, can be used for building up my solo keyboard playing skills in general


Cons
- No auto arranger. Pretty much throws out any live performance (unless I use the backing track functionality. It seems interesting, but transposing and/or prolonging songs seem to be problematic with a setup like this. In other words, feels like improv is pretty much dead in the water.)
- The above limitation makes it hard to experiment with different styles.
- It just feels like it's this instrument that's kind of hard to fit in anywhere.


The question is, can my money be better spent somewhere else? Maybe a GW8 (which does have arranger facilities) or something else?