Great reviews George and Diki! Nice and indepth too. Diki.., you touched upon something that I raised issue with before the unit started to ship.., and that was lack of style editing (outside of track mute, and volume changes). I had gone through the manual several times as well and I too was very shocked to not see that you couldn't revoice, adjust MFX, or even pan.

When we talked in the past regarding style creation on the GW-8 and using the software.., I was hopeful that you could at least take a style from the GW and use the software to tweek that, but it doesn't appear so.

I would say the focus on this unit was cleary the Fantom/SonicCell sound set and the world sounds/styles and NOT for user tweeks. It's odd though as they promote it as a "performers keyboard", but it seems someone forgot to tell the design team that. A performers keyboard wouldn't be so limited in the style editing. I could understand some seq limitations, but this is an arranger and users need to be able to get in there and tweek those styles (either internally or via included software)

One of the reasons I raised issue about this limited editing is that Yamaha's new S550 will allow you to tweek the styles now (internally). You can start from scratch or edit an existing one. However, the S550 lacks voice parameter editing such as (ADSR) and no filter adjustments either, and although the poly is less than 128 it's twice that of the typical Yamaha low end arranger.

IMO I think there's a feature or two Roland probably could have left off the GW-8 and replaced them with style editing. It doesn't make sense to me to make an arranger keyboard, market it as a performers keyboard, then cripple the style editing on the unit.

[This message has been edited by squeak_D (edited 10-17-2008).]