The thing was, Roland had a bad habit of trying to reinvent the wheel every time a new significant model change came around. Yamaha and Korg were far more incremental in their new models, very little got dropped, a few things got added, it made for a stable user base.

But from the G1000 to the VA76 was a huge divide, Vari-Phrase audio introduced, Chord sequencer axed, etc.. Then the change from VA76 to G70 was equally traumatic. Gone was the Vari-Phrase stuff (best of luck porting your styles and sequences that used that!) and a host of differences again. It got pretty exhausting as a Roland user having to start almost from scratch each time you upgraded.

Add to that Roland’s stubborn refusal to add multipad support which was a basic feature of Yamaha and Korg (so obviously non-proprietary) and which helps enormously to make styles less repetitive and predictable. Eventually, between these two factors, an awful lot of Roland players who swore by the G1000 ended up with Tyros’s or PA3x’s etc..

Once gone, most didn’t come back. We used to have endless comparisons between the brands back in the day, and fair’s fair, feature-wise it was hard to promote Roland as a pure ‘arranger’. I and many others still thought the basic ‘sound’ was very ‘live band’ compared to Yamaha, and as an only part-time user of the arranger section the sound was always my choice because back then I mostly split my time between full live bands and a few duo gigs. Roland’s held up fantastic in a live band, whereas Korg and Yamaha felt more ‘compressed’ and ‘home keyboard’ in sound.

Today I think that difference is much less. Genos’s and PA4/5x’s are pretty punchy now, and I think either of them would fit in with a live band easily.

So, bottom line, Roland’s became a bit dated as a pure arranger, and that trend continued into the BK series. Utterly amazing live band keyboards (I’ll take a BK9 over any of Roland’s stage keyboards like the Juno’s and VR-730!) but still crippled as a pure arranger with no multipads (other than you creating your own audio percussion loops for the Key Audio feature) and no sampler or ROM expansion.

In truth, if I primarily played arranger style for almost everything, I’d have a Genos2 or PA5x (love their ‘2 styles at a time’ idea!) but I still really want a keyboard that sits good in a live band or studio session as well as an arranger, and for me the BK9 still gets the job done. Roland went out on a high note… 🥺💔