At long last the dust seems to have settled here on the SZ forum. Taking a look at the arch contributors overhere one can ascertain that DonM is quite pleased with his Korg PA3X, Donny is over the moon with his PSR950, Diki of course is ever so pleased with the new Roland BK9, Uncle Dave is counting his blessings with his new Korg PA900 and Ian is and has been blessed with his Tyros 4. As a matter of fact the star price goes to the latter who has been singing the praises of and been loyal to his Yamaha Tyros for more thant two years now. "What a wonderful World ",Louis would have sung....
I am really pleased for all of you and hope this mood will persist here on the forum, trying to help one another out with sound advice rather than getting your knickers in a twist about who has the best keyboard etc.etc.
Uncle Dave's voyage with the PA900 has also made clear what I have maintained all along, to get some decent stuff out of any quality arranger requires scores and scores of hours of tweaking and programming.One of the reasons I stuck with the PA800 because I could not bring myself to having to start from scratch by purchasing the PA900 or PA3X. Anyway I ain't complaining with the additional PSR750.

regards,
John

P.S. it seems a lot of Yamaha fanatics are getting all worked up about the arrival of the new Tyros 5 or whatever it may be called. In my opinion it will have to be a quantum leap from the existing boards to get anywhere as I am sure it will retail at 4000 dollars/euros or even more. For that kind of money you can have your pick of TWO boards out of these three:
BK9, PSR950, PA900.......

My my my, John, has it been TWO years already? I guess that proves the old adage, "Time passes quickly when you are having fun."

I have only felt this contented with two arrangers prior to my Tyros4, and they were the PSR-8000 and the PSR-3000, although the S910 gets an honorable mention.

The Tyros5 holds no more interest to me than any new TOTL arranger by Yamaha or any other manufacturer...of course, it will be interesting to see what gets added, or perhaps, taken away, but I'm very content with my choice of arranger, and I am very grateful that I was able to acquire it at a very reasonable price.

I agree with the OS familiarity and also the tweaking process, as the former makes the latter so much easier, and having your own "sound" on an arranger is primarily due to style editing/assembly/re-voicing. The hours I spent programming on the PSR-8000 and PSR-3000 were more "fun" than work, and the Tyros4 is even better due to more style editing flexibility. In fact, at this point with the Tyros4, I am using only my own styles, but was helped along by good basic factory styles to work from, and a plethora of third party styles that became donors for my own assembled creations, which I lovingly refer to as my "Frankenstyles".

In spite of being under my fingers for TWO whole years , the Tyros4 still beckons me to turn it on and have fun. I put in at least two or three hours a day on the instrument, and I'm still blown away by the quality of the sounds, especially those lovely SA/SA2 voices that are so incredibly expressive.

If I was to add another keyboard, it might possibly be a Casio PX5S, which I feel would be a perfect compliment to my Tyros4.

I can see how having two (or even three) MOTL arrangers from different manufacturers would be very interesting, but I prefer to focus all my efforts on the one system I know extremely well.

Ian

I think it would be very difficult for the tyros 5 to improve in a major way on what it already does so very well . The only thing that might tempt me away from my pa1x that I have owned for some 8 years now is a proper onboard sequencer . I think sonically the tyros 4 replicates real instruments incredibly well and I have no idea what yamaha have up their sleeve this time around . This is a great time to be an arranger musician !

I hope for 76 keys that would make me very happy .

Try eight years! And ten for the G1000 before my G70.

And, in all likelihood, I'll still be playing my G70 with live bands for quite a while longer, simply because of the speed of the interface (although jury is out yet on whether the iPad apps will make that moot) and that wonderful action.

I'm actually playing more on my BK-9 at home than I have on an arranger so far, because of the Chord Sequencer. It's nice to finally have a great arranger that doesn't require me to be a one handed dummy, and let's me play two handed like I've been doing all my life..!