I was speaking to Bill a few weeks back and he made an interesting remark: "people don't care about good (instrumental) music anymore...they just want to hear vocals with a solid drum beat that they can dance to."

The other day I was talking to Don about our PA3x's and he said something similar: "do you really think anyone knows, or even cares, that you're using a $4k keyboard?......does anyone really listen that closely that they're going to come up to you and remark that the snare drum is not the right one for that song?"

I had a gig on Saturday night that I booked by boasting to them about my new PA3x. I spent the whole of last week learning the functions, programming songs, setting up the instrument cominations, etc etc. I finished it all by Friday and when I went to review all my settings I found many of them had "vanished" and I was left with a PA3x almost in default mode.

I decided to put what Bill and Don said to the test. I took out my 15 year old Roland E-300 and used that. I used my best EV's and sang my butt off. Lo and behold.......they're right. No one came up to me and said they could tell that was a 15 year old keyboard I was using! I couldn't tell myself 'cause, played right with a lot of pitch bend and vibrato on the onboard sounds, it sounded almost as good as any of today's keyboards (I'm thinking right now about Fran and Diki and their Rolands).

And that bring up another point. I've always played either Yamaha's or Roland's in the past. Roland was always my first choice as, at any given time, they were always years ahead in arranger keyboards.

Now I'm wondering why I bought a PA3x Yes, it's a great keyboard. But if all I need is "good vocals and a strong drum beat" I might just as well use a cheap-o keyboard with an industrial strength speaker system!

As the butcher said: "liver and loin!"