Hi.

This monday me and my wife was at a Roland G70 demo in Malmö, Sweden. The demo was arranged by 5 different musicstores in the south of Sweden together with Roland and Ralph Schink.
I used to own a Tyros (that i loved) and after what i have read in this forum, i didn't think to much of the G70.
But.....I must say that it was the best demonstration i have ever seen.

The "Ralph Schink show" started with a clean Grand Piano sound and, WOW, what a sound. I now really understand why Robert Wells (http://www.wellsmusic.se) plays Roland!

Some sounds and effects where demonstrated, all excellent.

After that Ralph played up a 'scene' from a wedding. He started in the church with choir, churchorgan and then 2 guitars + a saxophone. With the many splits he really got the best out of the KB. He also played the type megavoice sounds for the guitars and this was just so good, all from hitting the guitarbody to slides and strumming sounds. No tricks, he just played it.

For every song he played, he explained the functions, effects and how the style och arrangement was working together with the righthand sound.

The "wedding" went on with some dinnermusic, bridewalz and slowdance. After that the tempo went up and some rock'n roll sounded. He described the drawbars and played several organsounds. Disco was no problem, the synthsounds where very cool.

The D-beam really is a cool thing; for use as sfx or changing the sound from a trombone.

Bigband, jazzband, latin or worldmusic. All sounded very good. He also demonstrated some sounds from the SRX-card World music, a Didgeroo from Australia and some other sounds. Impressive.

He demonstrated the Vocal Harmonizer and it sounded much better than the Tyros. The Auto-pitch function was very cool for those (like me) who does not sing very well!

Before he ended he 'just had to play' TicoTico and did he play!? The tempo was at 140bpm when he started and he increased it to incredible 212bpm!! It was almost not possible to see his fingers through the videosystem that was showing his playingtechnique or the display.

The demonstration ended with that Ralph played a nice song with only the Grand piano.


Both my wife and i where stunned by the sound from the KB and of course the perfomance from Ralph Schink.

After listening to G70 for an hour and half, played by such a great KB-player, my conclusion must be as follows......

The Roland G70 runs in eights around Tyros, not just by it's more professional look but also with better sound, better effects and better keys!

Best: *76 keys
*"real" splitpoints
*scatvoices
*the most used functions as real buttons
*easy controlled touch screen
*sounds
*D-beam
*vocal harmonizer
*playable "megavoices"

Worst: I don't have the money to buy it!

This is all in my (and also my wifes) personal opinion. Maybe there are other ways of seeing things, this is just one way.
I hope that this little "review" is appreciated.

Best regards

/Mats

Thank's a lot for the report Mats.
I'm sorry to say I did not reach the demo here
in Bergen last week, and it looks like I missed
a nice performance done by Ralph Schink.
GJ

"The Roland G70 runs in eights around Tyros"

hmmmmm, I find this a little hard to believe at this point based on user feedback and I have not been able to hear one live.

The Tyros is a tough act to beat...especially being $1400.00 cheaper than the G70!!!

One of G70 review was mine. I did the same remarks: G70 is very similar to Yamaha's arranger.

My disappointment was only with style programming (e.g. I cannot find bebop style in jazz section, only couple of dozen swings), effects programming (mainly corrected in OS update) and style morphing. And lacks of pads (D-beam not replace pads).

Sounds are great, action great, many featers great. Even several styles are great. On par with Yamaha -- overall.

But I want more for $3600 that paid by me. Good or bad styles is depending of peoples taste. The same about sounds. It all about taste. On features G70 not less then Tyros. It is not about taste, it is shared between people.

Sorry for my Ruslish.

Yepp, and thank's heaven for that we have different taste,
or else it would have been a kind of boring, eh?



GJ

You have to remember that real 'pros' make almost any keyboard sound incredible.

zuki

Zuki You hit it there!

How many times have we all been mesmerised by a pro demo on an 'ordinary' instrument, only to be rather disappointed when we ourselves tried to copy the demo

------------------
Eddie from Rotherham
www.yamahakeyboards.info

G-70 and Tyros are sold at the same street-price here in austria and germany: ~2800 EUR (~3600,-USD).
For that you get no 20Gig HD but 76 very good keys and a card slot which takes cards up to 4Gigs and can not suffer from crashes.

It's all your choice :-)

mfg
Chris

[QUOTE]Originally posted by chdolar:
[B] G-70 and Tyros are sold at the same street-price here in austria and germany: ~2800 EUR (~3600,-USD).
For that you get no 20Gig HD but 76 very good keys and a card slot which takes cards up to 4Gigs and can not suffer from crashes.

It's all your choice :-)


I don't understand why Roland did not incorperate a Hard drive on their keyboard. Every other keyborad manufacturer is moving towards this format for storage. Firstly, it is a cheap means of storage, and one can use any companies drives and a multitude HD capacities. Propritary card slots etc.. are normally much more expensive then main stream data storage systems. The cynical side of me thinks it is a means for the manufacturers to generate more revenues.

Roland uses a 50Mb SSD for internal memory( solid state disc). 50Mgs is not alot of space. Especially when companies like Korg have 20Gb drives on boards & yamaha sell 20Gb upgrades for the tyros.

@ Chdolar---are the card slots you are refering to for actual blank memory upgrade to do with as one wishes, or are you talking about the SRX slots which are for Rolands sound banks ( with burned in sound for expanding the voice sections)?

I wonder if one could add an external HD to the G-70?? anyone?

Thank-you
Regards;
SCP

[QUOTE]Originally posted by chdolar:
[B] G-70 and Tyros are sold at the same street-price here in austria and germany: ~2800 EUR (~3600,-USD).
For that you get no 20Gig HD but 76 very good keys and a card slot which takes cards up to 4Gigs and can not suffer from crashes.

It's all your choice :-)


I don't understand why Roland did not incorperate a Hard drive on their keyboard. Every other keyborad manufacturer is moving towards this format for storage. Firstly, it is a cheap means of storage, and one can use any companies drives and a multitude HD capacities. Propritary card slots etc.. are normally much more expensive then main stream data storage systems. The cynical side of me thinks it is a means for the manufacturers to generate more revenues.

Roland uses a 50Mb SSD for internal memory( solid state disc). 50Mgs is not alot of space. Especially when companies like Korg have 20Gb drives on boards & yamaha sell 20Gb upgrades for the tyros.

@ Chdolar---are the card slots you are refering to for actual blank memory upgrade to do with as one wishes, or are you talking about the SRX slots which are for Rolands sound banks ( with burned in sound for expanding the voice sections)?

I wonder if one could add an external HD to the G-70?? anyone?

Thank-you
Regards;
SCP

The first use of the large HD that would come to my mind would be the use and storage of high quality samples/voices. For instance the Triton extreme uses a Bossendorfer piano patch that consisting of 16Mb. So it wouldn't take too long to fill up 50Mb of storage with a couple of these types of voices. Second use would be to store numerous sets of sequenced arrangements. Third would be wav files. Due to their format they can consume memory.

Thanks for pointing out the PCMCIA slot

Regards;
SCP

No sampler - no need for huge storage.
No mp3/wav recording - no need for an (external) CD-ROM drive either, or am I wrong?

BTW: The grandX piano which is in the Fantoms is in the G70, too. Sounds great.

Yes, I agree with you. The files managed by G-70 have very little size, hence large storage capacity is not needed.
Solid state memories are more reliable, are easy to manage and you can easily move and use them on different devices (keyboard, PC, palm, camera, etc.)

Hallo,
on my Tyros HD I stored 3000 iItems. (Songs and Styles) The space needed for is 180 MB,
less than 1% of the 20 Giga HD. Tell me , what shell I do with the 99% ?
Regards Hanspeter

That's what I meant in my earlier post, Hanspeter. On a keyboard that doesn't have sampling, MP3 playing/recording or WAV file playing, I don't see the point in adding a 30Gb harddisk. Although relatively inexpensive nowadays it is still at least $ 80,- worth of hardware. In the case of a Tyros I would prefer 76 keys instead.

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Tom NL

I used the HD of my 9000pro for backing up my computers workspace - and I'm NOT kidding :-).

/Ulrich

Well, if the audience doesn't like your performance and the customer won't pay - maybe you could trade some software and or movies you carry around on your HD to make the money.
Someone ever thought of that? (just kidding :-)

[QUOTE]Originally posted by ironhill:
Hallo,
on my Tyros HD I stored 3000 iItems. (Songs and Styles) The space needed for is 180 MB,
less than 1% of the 20 Giga HD. Tell me , what shell I do with the 99% ?
Regards Hanspeter [/QUOTE

If you purchase a VSTi sampler ( even though your kb doesn't have an internal sampler) you can utilize pre-recorded sample from other companies. So, for instance Gigastudio has an orchestra library that one can buy and load on to ones keyborad. This new library includes over 4GB of orchestral
samples from every instrument family of the orchestra ( ex. strings, piano, brass etc..). So, thats where the use of the extra space of a 30 Gb HD would be very useful, and the 50Mg SSD would not suffice.

I don't think $80 for an HD on a $3500 Flagship arranger is to much to ask and only comprises 2.2% of the total cost. It at least could have been offered as an option. Therefore those that wanted it could install after a purchase.

Hallo, haha--
some of these suggestions I expected, really. Unfortunately my 'Secretary of Treasury' didn't
grant additional money. Yesterday I ordered a SRX Expansion Board for my new G-70.
"Nothing more" she said. Other suggestions without further cost I will think over.
Regards Hanspeter

Congratulations on your purchase of the SRX board. Which one did you get?



------------------
Tom NL

Yes I must admit. There should be the possibility to add a HD as an option, even if I don't need it ... :-)

I tried each board during christmas holidays - and for me SRX-06 Complete Orchestra was the best addition to the factory sounds. I played over 10 gigs with my G-70 and every time it comes to the SRX Strings I feel very happy again... By the way - it would be great if Roland would offer a special SRX Board for entertainers - for Korg PA1XPro there are some special sound expansion boards for this keyboard...
Beside the G-70, I use a Korg Triton Pro and Roland JV-2080 with 8 SR JV Boards.
Greetings Poldi Denk

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http://www.rolandus.com

some new videos here, if you click on the G-70 picture.

Pretty good! Thanks for the link.

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Tom NL

Hallo Tom,
I decided on Studio SRX-3 because it has the greatest variety in my opinion.
Regards Hanspeter

Dear Hanspeter;

How do you find the quality of the sound in the SRX card? Are they realistic , life-like ( live sounding) Can the sounds be used for style creation ( ex in the accompaniment sections)

Thanks
Regards;
SCP

Hallo SCP,
my expansion board will be deliver at wednesday, hopefully. Therefor I can't say a final
judgement of. The test I did before ordering seems to me that the most of the sounds have
a very good dynamic. My main aspect in this case is to experiment, not absolutly get more
natural samples. But I found that there are some brass, guitar samples and others met my
taste. I think, the sounds can be embed in melodic parts of styles. Bank select and
program change are described in the manual.
Regards: Hanspeter

[[B] [QUOTE] Can the sounds be used for style creation ( ex in the accompaniment sections)

Hallo,
this morning I got my SRX 3 Expansion. I tried to use the tones within Styles. It works, but you
have to change or insert all the bank select and program changes within every track you need
by style micro edit. The sounds are I expected.
Regards: Hanspeter