Greetings Donny. A few years ago Guitar Center had a G70 on display and I played around with it for a while and went through the sounds, etc., but unfortunately I was less than thrilled with it. Other people obviously disagree with my assessment and as I said before to each his own.

By the way in my previous post I meant to type: falling on deaf 'ears' when I was talking about polyphony. Sorry for the typo. Now where was I? Oh yeah. The G70 is built like a tank and for that matter so is my Fantom G7. The G70 has a lot of nice features but I was disappointed with the less than stellar sounds that I demo'd. Although the display model was likely 'out of the box' sounds and I'm sure you could tweak them to make them more suitable to your preference. Hey, if Fran thinks the G70 is the bees knees then more power to him. I happen to disagree with him but it's still a very nice arranger. And I enjoyed his song too.

I'm chomping at the bit trying to decide which arranger to get. I miss arrangers and in fact I started out playing on arrangers before anything else. I was seriously considering a Tyros5 76 key but I felt Yamaha dropped the ball by giving it the usual 128 note polyphony. Some people complained the Tyros 4 had note drop off so I was surprised when Yammie didn't address the issue on the Tyros5. Oh well. I figure the Pa4x will cost around $4,000 but I really don't expect Korg to double the polyphony. Korg has been playing catch up when it comes to polyphony. For years it was 62 note then 120 and finally 128 on the Pa-900 thank God. But even 128 note polyphony doesn't cut it any more especially if you compose complex arrangements. It doesn't take rocket science to double the polyphony to 256 and a prime example is the Casio PX-5S that I have mentioned before and it costs less than a grand but as we know it's not an arranger unfortunately.

I hope to check out the Pa-300 when it hits store shelves but that could be six months from now or even longer since Korg is mighty skimpy when it comes to delivering their arranger products to the Guitar Centers in my area. I know I know. I could buy something sight unseen online and take it back if I'm not satisfied and I might end up doing that since one of the Guitar Centers in my area is a hop skip and jump away. I really like to play them beforehand if at all possible but the times they are indeed changing and from what I understand the Big 3 is focusing primarily on online sales as a way to trim costs and meet their sales objectives. And for all we know Guitar Center might not be in business five years from now because of the financial mess they're in.

All the best, Mike