Oh well,I am bound to have your attention with such a heading, what ?!!
Today I first tickled the ivories on my friend's recently purchased G70. For a good understanding, I used to be quite keen on Roland and programmed very extensively on the G-800 in the 90ties. Over the last 3 years or so I have been quite content with my KorgPA80 (and recently PA50) arranger keyboard, whilst retaining the archaic Roland E70, mainly for its splendid acoustic piano sound.Anyway back to the G70.
I can now well understand my friend Roel's reaction on first hearing the G70 and returning it to the shop within days. Rightly so ? that is not for me to judge,but what I do know is that the G70 suffers the same fate as ALL its Roland predecessors, and that is that it has been extremely poorly programmed in the overall
PERFORMANCE section , including the songbook. IN this respect yamaha and above all Technics are much more impressive straight from the box. It is almost shameful to see how little effort Roland has put in these performances. For starters all G70 users are well advised to turn down the master reverb on virtually all performances etc. One has to re-create performances or user programs all but from scratch, and taking into account the manyfold possibilities (and intracacies !!) of this keyboard we are almost talking about a daytime occupation !!!!!.
As such I had little opportunity to get down to the nitty gritty of the sounds but in as far as I did I can only say they were quite good,though not spectacular.
The styles that I heard did not particularly impress me though they were'nt bad, but my first impression was that the learning curve to master this instrument is pretty steep as well, certainly if you are not into Roland. My conclusion for the time being therfore is that Roland has come up with a good arranger keyboard with great potential, but of which I doubt many users will manage to get down to use more than 25% of this potential. And I repeat, first time buyers on hearing the board straight out of the box will not be particularly tempted.
Oh and while I'm at it, as you know I economised this year by buying a Korg PA-50 and I still think this is a wonderful , almost "professional "keyboard (haha) at a price that puts ALL other keyboards to shame. (mine was 840 euros, brand new)!!!!!
Happy New Year to all of you,
regards,
John

Hi John,

Happy newyear!
It seems you have similar feeling as I had ... on the G70 ?

Still very happy with the PA1XPro.

Roel

ONLY if it's NOT made in Scotland! LOLLLLLL

[This message has been edited by Vquestor (edited 01-03-2005).]