I have to agree with some of the other posts... I wasn't overly impressed with the demos from the G70.... Especially given that demos tend to be more highly produced than the real thing.
Heck, my PA-80 sounded just as good (other than drums) as anything coming out of the G70...

I doubt I'll be rushing out to get one anytohme some.
Regards,
Steve

i agree. The Roland offering on paper at least does not include anything that we would have tempted me. The demo's sound like a well put together demo but thats not really a testament to the actual usefull ness of the keyboard.I have still got my eye on the Korg PA1X but i am trying to balance off the extra cash against the percieved extra benefit compared to my old keyboard. I think it might be just new purchase lust on my part as i spent a good 3 hours with my old board last night and i was amazed that even now (after 5 years ownership) The keyboard still has so many surprises for me and the sound is quite cool. I did a version of the funk demo (G70) and its sounds just as wicked (in my humble opinion) .

Demosongs are allways good.But because these
songs are played on the G70 I am happy.
The VA7 had very good sounds and drums and
that is why I think the G70 must be great.

Hi

It looks as if your reasons for choosing the VA were much the same as mine. The integration of the zip drive into the instrument as a whole is an act of genius (I beleive the older G1000 was similar).

My logic was that the thing did what I wanted, and no other keyboard did. Namely, to associate all the settings needed for two handed playing - splits, layers, FX and so on - with a specific midifile, and to be able to save the whole for instant recall.

For this ability, I was prepared to make some scarifices in the sound quality. Most audiences are tone deaf anyway :-) so it would only bother me and the rest of the band.

I was also prepared to forgo using the thing as a live arranger on stage, although I have to confess that I am somewhat taken aback at just how bad the VA is when used in that mode. Basically, duff styles & totally uncontrollable.

My reaction to the G-70 is a bit different from your own, however. On paper, a lot of it looks very promising. The mix of a lot of dedicated hard buttons & sliders on the panel, plus a touch screen for editing in more detail, seems to be a good way of accessing the operating system. In terms of the overall specification, I actually think that Roland are on the right track in trying to do the basics well, rather than heaping ever more features of dubious value (variphrase? how we laughed.....) onto an otherwise badly designed arranger.

As a case in point, when eventually bought a Korg i30 as a potential replacement for the old i3 I used to use, I found that Korg had broken the golden rule of "if it ain't broke, dont fix it".

The panel layout of the older instrument was brilliant. Huge unmissable buttons for all the things you wanted in a hurry - like drum breaks, stop/start etc. That newer instrument had a long row of identical little buttons in a row above the keyboard. The most stupid was placing the "Save" button right next to "Start/Stop". You were guaranteed to hit the wrong one mid gig - then have to escape out of the "save" sequence. Dumb!

In the same way, the older instrument used to work great with the Digitech VHM5 vocal harmony box I used. The newer one had a different - worse - midi spec, which meant that it only transmitted the notes you played with your left hand, if you actually had a tone sounding on those keys, which you may not always want. Mute the left hand live part & suddenly - no vocal harmonies! This problem was confirmed by Korg to be true. At that point I gave up struggling with the thing and ditched it.

For me, a lot will depend on how the G-70 actually sounds, and how good the arranger mode is. I am looking for styles which sound up to date & "fresh", rather than the early 80's organ Bossanova cheese flavour, which seems to colour most of Rolands efforts so far.

In terms of controllability, I would have preferred the style part/break buttons somewhere near the middle of the panel, rather than on the left. Am I alone in wanting to access these with either hand? I normally use my right hand (being right handed) for speed and accuracy. I also might want to trigger a half bar break at the moment a chord change is due. Bit difficult if your left hand is operating the buttons :-)

Roland also mention four variations and six breaks per style for the G-70. Sounds good, but I don't see six individual drum break buttons anywhere on the front panel......

I asked the Roland demonstrator about this.
When you select "auto fill in" you will get a break/fill-in when you switch "up" to the next variation.

So 1st to 2nd is the first fill in, 2nd to 3rd the second etc. It does this also when selecting a "lower" variation, so from 4th to 3rd is the fourth fill-in, from 3rd to 2nd the fifth, etc. It also does a break/fill-in when you hit the button of your current variation.

BTW, the four variation buttons also trigger the four intro's and endings. Intro one is just drums, and probably the one you will use a lot if you want to use a programmed intro. Intro two is an interesting one. This one has no chord progression, but is created to enable you to play your your own chords during the intro, thus making the intro blend much better with the song.

I hope I explained it ok, because English is not my native language.

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

[This message has been edited by Tom NL (edited 12-04-2004).]

Hmmmmmm. Interesting - and thanks for the excellent explanation.

Whether what Roland have done here is adequate or not, only practical testing will reveal. My initial reaction is that it sounds unnecessarly limited.

Again, the old Korg i3 got this right over 10 years ago. You could set up either of it's break buttons independantly to go to a choice of main style variations at will. Either button could be set to return to the same variation, go up one, go down one, jump to a specific one, or toggle between any chosen two. The settings were specific to each break button, and could be different for each stored song patch.

That, plus the chord mapping feature which meant that you could have up to four totally different breaks under each break button per style (one of which, for example, you could set so it would only be triggered if you played a flattened 10th demented chord) gave you huge control over the arranger section.

Same thinking was true of the main style variations, which actually had up to six "shades" under each one, triggered by chord type. This went far beyond the ususal major, minor, seventh recognition. You could freely pick which "shade" was triggered for somthing like 32 recognizable chord types, per variation, per style. Again - these could all be stored differently for each song, so two songs which happened to use the same basic style could be made to behave quite differently.

I haven't seen the job done fundamentally better than this on any make of arranger before or since.

This is the sort of thing I was meaning when I mentioned in an earlier post about the importance of getting the basics of an instrument right, before adding all the "fairy dust" novelty features.

Regards - Mike