I may never make claim to any musical talent (and certainly won't be posting any demos ). But I do like to tinker with the technology and thought you might be interested in my latest incarnation which I call a PA800XR - details of which you can find here

Best Regards
Paul.

Wow! The spirit of Frankenstein lives!

That is quite an achievement, there, Paul. Kudos for having the 'nads to give this a go.

We'd all love to hear some audio of the integration project. Have you got the Fantom to play a part in the PA styles as well as RH voices?

This is a great project... Congratulations.

I have not done this but it is very easy with the PA800 since any part (both styles and realtime LH/RH voices) can be set to drive either internal, external or both parts on the respective midi channel. This makes the PA800 excellent for driving external gear.

In fact believe it or not, although I do use styles my main use is playing live parts in a church band. So why base my ultimate keyboard on the PA800 you may ask. Well I was using an X7 but in my opinion it has a few shortcomings:

1. For live use the live setting mode of the X7 is very limited in comparsion to the songbook mode of the PA800 (or infact any arranger with performances/registrations etc.)

2. The organs on the X7 in my opinion are only average - even with the Ultimate Keys expansion board.

3. The X7 doesn't have internal speakers which I find really useful.

4. The keybed on the X7 is good but has a very abrupt/hard end to the keystroke which gives me a lot of soreness in my fingers when playing hard. The G70 and VK161-ORGAN keybeds both have a much softer bottom on the keystroke - and I just happened to discover that the VK161-ORGAN used the same electrical interface as the PA800 for its keybeds.

5. I do like to have styles and MP3's available for practicing along to. I could do this with a PC but it's just nice to have it all integrated and get completely away from the PC (just feels more like a musical instrument to me).

Of course I could just have a number of seperate boxes and achieve most of this, however the weight goes up and its not really plug and play and most importantly doesn't really feel like a musical instrument. I have always liked the simplicity of a single keyboard.

Best Regards
Paul.

Nice answer there, Paul. I, too, find that arrangers often make better 'live play' keyboards that workstations.

Have you got the SRX-11 Piano card in your Fantom Rack? That's one of the best sampled pianos I've ever played...

And maybe if you sampled a TD-module into either the Korg or Roland, you could get some seriously live sounding drums going, too!

I must say, that rig shows a lot of potential... I have been toying with adding a Motif Rack to my G70, but I don't think I will be as brave as you in combining the two (plus my G70 is heavy enough already!)

Oh, and don't worry about posting demos. We are (or should be!) FAR more interested in the sound of the integrated system than in picking apart your playing...

Maybe once you have revoiced some styles to use the best of each, just a short piece of the style play (don't worry about wowing us with your RH!) would show how these integrate together...

I have got this card and of all the pianos on Roland arrangers/synths this is my favorite. Interestingly I have not installed this board though in my setup because I found that if I took the patches on the SRX-11 and revoiced them using the internal samples of the Fantom-X piano that there was really not a lot of difference in the resulting sound and infact I actually slightly preferred the revoiced patches because they were very slightly brighter.

Best Regards
Paul.