Pretty cool little keyboard, I think it's gonna give the PSR series a run for their money

So how are they for Western Music? How do they compare to the italian Roland arranger products

Hope you sell 12 in one day. Lloyd

I wish Roland success with this to earn enough money they can invest in new up-market instruments.

I am hard headed for this...

Marketing for the product so far has been pretty bad, and mostly aimed at the oriental markets...

Their marketing decisions, or lack of, has an Albatross around their necks for some years now, at least when at comes to arrangers.

Only when it comes to arrangers...

Marketing for their Aira range is spot on..

Well, not only regarding arrangers, if you see marketing in the broader sense including product design, it was, for instance, a stupid restriction to limit the great Integra to 64 studio sets, which makes it usable for live purposes with workarounds only. I just hope the changes in the management and ownership structure has lead to changes in this respect. Aira might be a positive indication.

Has Roland US put out an official demo video English?

http://www.roland.com/products/e-a7/

Spec wise, the Roland E-A7 looks decent enough for the price range. Wave Expansion Memory is still quite low at 128 MBs.

I do like the Song Chord Extractor feature idea. I guess it automatically detects the chords in smf files. I have to run my midi songs through a program like PSRUIT to predetermine what midi channels I want analyzed to extract the chords. I generally would make up sheet music in Sibelius with the selected notation, lyrics, and chords and rework the midi channels for the parts I want to play on my Tyros 5 and what midi parts to be played by the midi song file.

For the more complex midi songs or my own compositions I will sync the midi song file to the selected customized style and optional multipad play with automatic OTS settings, and I simply play along with the printed sheet music, lyrics, and follow the chords to track the style to the synced midi song file. Of course simpler songs, I just use the suitable style. Still working on transferring all my sheet music to tablet and PDF display.

I would think on the E-A7 the Song Chord Extractor would work similar and display the detected chords from the SMF so you can play along with a style. Too bad Roland doesn't come out with a nice new full featured TOTL arranger. I always liked the Roland quality.

Marcus