I swallowed hard when Fedex delivered it with a big hole in the side of the box, but all looked well inside. Phew.

I love the light weight, and the bright touch screen is awesome. I had a Pa2X, and this is much larger and more sensitive.

It took me quite a while to work out the global settings I needed, having had a Tyros 4 for the last 21 months. And then looked for the save to global. Eventually I figured out that you no longer need to do that, it keeps your global and locked settings in memory even when you turn it off. Cool.

The Master EQ frustrated me for a while, since I seemed to be making changes but nothing happened. Finally I realized that you need to turn Master EQ ON, and then the thing came alive. I set mine at +1.5/0/+1.5/+3.0 for the internal speaker configuration and I am very impressed with the sound, both the overall volume and clarity. I’m going to try using it in smaller locations with the internal speakers alone.

I played around with the mic settings but at this moment I am perfectly happy with the default settings for my Countryman E6 mic. Experience in different locations will refine this, but making the changes is easy. I do quite a bit of talking during the program, and setting up Talk on one of the assignable switches takes the reverb down to a natural level. I wish the light would stay lit when selected, so that I could see the setting it was in (On or Off – there’s no indication on the touchscreen either). At the moment it lights briefly when you touch it, either way.

I erased the factory songbook and started my own, and once again it was tricky to work out how to save the settings you need, but once I figured it out setting up the next songs were a piece of cake. I loved the reworked styles that I was used to playing, and the sounds were great, the new Concert Grand Piano, Real Strings, Concert Strings, Movie Strings, Trumpet Expr. are awesome. Again making changes to the styles to my taste is relatively straightforward (eg changing out distortion guitar for more strings in a Rock Ballad style). I love the Korg sequence Pads, especially the Piano Arpeggios and Strings, and have really missed them on the Tyros. I never managed to find the time to find them (I’m sure they are out there) but the ones I love are right there in the Korg menu.

I couldn’t get enough done to set it up for tomorrow’s gigs, shame, but I saved all my work to a USB drive (just in case). I can’t wait to put it through its paces in a real situation. So far, I am thrilled.