I was able to play the Casio WK-7500 at GC today and from my standpoint it's a winner... to an extent. Lot's of features for the price and at $499.99 it's a huge bargain in my opinion. The Stereo Piano 01 is actually quite decent and much more suitable than some of the 'other brand' mid-range arrangers out there and definitely better than my former PSR 2000 AC piano.

There are 100 Organ sounds to use in conjunction with the Drawbar Organ function and 50 are already factory preset. You can press a button to speed up or slow down the leslie simulation plus a Perc button along with an extra button right next to it that gives an added effect. There is a modulation button right above the Pitch/Bend wheel. When you press and hold the button a modulation effect occurs and when you release the button modulation stops. I'm not as yet sure if you can control some (or any) of the buttons or functions using a foot pedal. The User Manual should clear that up needless to say. But with only "one" Pedal input I kind of doubt whether you can control other things besides sustain though.

You can record up to 13 minutes of your playing in real-time at the push of a button and then save it to an SD card. The headphone jack is located on the back panel which I would have rather preferred it on the front. Oh well. But as for the sounds some of them are actually quite good for a $500 dollar keyboard. As I said the main Piano sound is quite good and a few other Piano sounds are decent as well for an entry level keyboard. Some of the EP's are quite good also. Many of the Organs, especially the Drawbar function-linked Organs, are very good too in my opinion. If you play mainly Organ in a Church etc. you can easily get by with the Organ sounds in the WK-7500 in my opinion. In fact, the Organ sounds alone are worth the price of admission if you ask me. Some of the String sounds are pretty good as well. Accordions are okay but the Harmonicas don't cut it in my opinion. Acoustic Guitars are so-so, in my opinion, but a couple of the Electic and Distortion guitars are pretty decent - for the price. Brass leaves something to be desired but you're only paying a small pittance for the keyboard itself so don't expect miracles in every category needless to say right? wink The Drum Kits have improved over previous models in my opinion. The actual keyboard "action" is quite acceptable too in my opinion. I would rate the action as better than the PSR 900 series and actually pretty similar to the T4 FSX action. 76 keys and under 20 lbs. is a bonus as well. You can easily carry it under one arm and as George Kaye mentioned you can even use batteries instead of AC power if you want to. The LCD is larger than a lot of high-end keyboards on the market which is rather nice for such an inexpensive keyboard. The Auto Accompaniment arranger feature(s) are not real sophisticated though but again what do you expect for $500 bucks? There's only a few categories of Styles available but the one's I played sounded pretty decent to my ears. And I've got good ears. wink That is to say, no hearing defects per se i.e. I'm not hard of hearing like perhaps many of our senior members might have encountered in their ascendance to old age. Yeah... I'm talking to you Fran. laugh lol Just kidding of course. wink

For a newbie just learning to play an arranger keyboard I would highly recommend the Casio WK-7500 as a solid training keyboard. For more experienced players looking for an inexpensive option for playing some really decent Organ sounds in a very light portable package I would highly recommend it to you as well. And as I stated previously many of the other bread n' butter sounds are above average also for this price range. And with a very large amount of features packed into this very inexpensive and highly portable keyboard I can't say enough of what a good deal this Casio WK-7500 is turning out to be. Casio will likely sell a boat load of them, especially to young people and students just starting out. Kudos to Casio. They seem to keep introducing consistently better keyboard product advancements into the marketplace as time goes by and at remarkably meager price points. smile

64 note polyphony is a little bit of a letdown but I wouldn't doubt it if their next model has 128 note polyphony like some of their inexpensive Privia's already have. Keep 'em coming Casio! cool

All the best,
Mike



Edited by keybplayer (02/08/11 06:15 PM)
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