Hi

I have been gigging a G-70 for about 7-8 months now. It followed a VA-76 which, itself, followed a Korg i3.

In general, I am not very satisfied with the overall sound quality of the G-70. Even after endless tweeking and fine tuning it still doesn't sound all that good. With both the previous instruments mentioned, I found I could get a decent sound quickly & easily, which could then be further refined if needed. Whilst personal taste comes into it, there are too many people (owners and none owners) who are making negative comments about the sound of the G-70 for it to be simple prejudice.

On the other hand, the ease of use of the G-70 is generally excellent - with two notable areas of exception:

1) - You cannot trigger drum fills completely freely and at will like you can with most other arrangers, as there are NO dedicated fill buttons. Instead, Roland have linked the fills to the various style variations. The main variation buttons then have a dual purpose in that a fill can be made to sound as you select the next variation. This is OK up to a point, but means that the fill that they have married to each style variation remains permanently permanently married to that variation only & can't be changed (e.g. you can't have the fill that they have used for variation one available to variation three, other than by programming a completely new user style).

2) - The one-touch settings facility is generally regarded by many G-70 owners as being less well designed than it could have been. Essentially, you can only link a group of one-touch settings to a particular style, rather than to a performance memory (full panel memory). One obvious consequence is that you cannot link a set of one-touch settings to a specific midifile as you can on instruments like the PA1X. Second consequence is that you can only have one group of one-touch settings per style. There are other limitations beyond this also.

One other point to consider between the G-70 and forthcoming E-80 is that the latter has has no separate output sockets available for the vocal harmony section. This may prove a problem, as the PA settings you might
want to use to get the best from your vocals (and to avoid feedback) may not be the same as you want for the keyboard sounds. With the G-70 you can do this by feeding the separate vocal outputs into a different PA mixer channel from the main keyboard sounds.

Assuming that the vocal section is essentially the same as the G-70, there are extensive tone, volume & FX controls available on the instrument to fine-tune the vocals internally, but - in practical terms -this ain't the same as being able to grab a physical knob on the PA to solve a feedback problem in a difficult venue. You certainly won't be in a position to change the internal vocal settings for every single patch once you've got to the gig and found that you are in trouble.

Hope this helps

Regards - Mike


[This message has been edited by MikeTV (edited 04-24-2006).]