Mike, Al,

My experience with Tyros is limited to playing one in the store, so perhaps I will welcome any corrections to what I recall its (or most other keyboards') voice/style selection process to be.

However, if you are trying to change the voice to a different one in the same group (but on one a different page within a group), you have to select the group, end up at the first (or is it current voice's) page, and then page forward/back until you see the tone you want. It may be less of a problem on Yamahas because of the tactile feedback you receive when pressing a button, and perhaps a faster screen redraw, and possibly, a more logical grouping of tones; however, having to wade through the pages, looking for the sound you want is what I consider a problem for live playing. Having a big displays is great, but unless it allows to increase the information density (show more stuff), it is only beneficial to vision-impaired people - you see no more information on the Tyros' great big display than on a smaller one of PSR3000. In fact, even Technics with its huge display only displayed 8 or 10 selectable items at a time - a big waste of screen space. As far as I know, only GEM currently has 16 buttons on the sides of the screen, which could be (but I don't think are) used for supporting menus of 16 selectable items on screen.

Rolands (G1000, VA-series, and I am sure G70) also support multiple voices for rignt and left hands, and I too use them to "cue up" voices to be used in a piece. However, this is only a cludgy workaround to the problem of being unable to quickly change the voices in any other way (on Yamahas you can use OTS buttons). Instead, I would have liked to use voice layering for what it was intended - adding subtle nuances to the solo parts, and still have the ability to quickly make voice selections with one or two button pushes.

One approach which I thought was interesting was in Ketron X1 - the "matrix" of 24 buttons corresponded to the 24 locations displayed on screen for One Touch selections, so in the One Touch mode, you have 24 sounds selectable at a single push of a button. It had its idiosyncrasy too - the 24 cells on screen were arranged in 3 columns of 8 rows each, while the buttons were arranged in 3 rows of 8 columns each, forcing you to do a mental "transposition". Nonetheless, the idea was good.

As I said, the touchscreen gives Roland the flexibility to achieve higher information density with more virtual buttons on screen. I do hope they make use of it, and make the instrument more user-friendly.

Regards,
Alex