That is very sad news indeed. I was really hoping that Roland had got this one right after the very poor effort that the VA series represents (I own a VA-76. In most respects, it's crap).

Whilst I will still give the G-70 a good checkout, as soon as the local dealer has one to try, your early findings are not encouraging.

The first ominous sign for me was the lack of 6 buttons to manually trigger the 6 fills they boast about. Rather than do the obvious, they seem to have - yet again - made a simple thing difficult.

Your description of the sounds and styles in one of your other posts suggests that the instrument is too similar to the VA for comfort - and that instrument sounds like something costing £500 from about 10 years ago. Not good.

As another act of stupidity, I notice that the G-70 is one inch bigger all round than the already bulky VA-76. So it won't fit the same flight case. Dumb, or what?