At the recent keyboard clinic, I got to try the Ensemble a little bit on my buddy Johnny's Tyros5-76, using it, as Diki mentioned above, with the Big Band/Jazz styles, as my friend is a very capable jazz player. Needless to say, it freaked the two of us out...pretty startlingly realistic. Almost uncanny even without adding the Harmony Voice Effect that reads the left hand chord and applies appropriate notes...some of the harmony settings we tried were pretty complex, (4-Way open/close) with equally complex chords, but because the individual sounds were separated it didn't turn into mush...it actually sounded like a bunch of horn players, including the very slight tuning discrepancies, and phrasing imperfections.

I can get a little bit close with the Tyros4 SA Horns and Saxes and Trumpets when stacking R1, R2 and R3 and carefully assigning the harmony to each sound, and tweaking the tuning a bit, but it really wouldn't put a patch on the new Ensemble's arse.

The only thing I tried on the Ensemble Strings was using a factory preset and the full keyboard (no style) to play the tune Yesterday...it sounded pretty cool, but I'm sure I could get better results if I dug into the settings, or used it with the style I have made especially for the tune (it has various string sounds with a lone acoustic guitar) if I dug into it a bit. Again, even without my tweaking, it was very realistic.

All in all, both of us thought it was pretty clever, and I'm looking forward to our next clinic.

Ian

PS...At the next clinic I'll try and record myself playing a few tunes using Tyros5's Ensemble Strings and Brass to give an idea what these things sound like when played by your average arranger player.

I'll make sure to convert them to Audio.