I am considering to have my budget under $1500.00 for an arranger keyboard. Any recommendations are appreciated.

My main interest is:
-Voices must be pro quality. Basic sounds must be awesome: acoustic piano, electric pianos, brass, strings, bass and sax.
-Styles: I only care the drum rythms must be excellent with nice fill-ins.
-Quick access to change above parameters.
-Vocal harmonizer: nice solid VH that can follow my right hand comping. According to some, that is not possible with current arrangers. I have to purchase a separate, expensive VH module. How about just following my voice ?

I am considering the USED as well as NEW ones. I will get more bang for the buck with the used ones.

Some current candidates that I know of that can do the things I mentioned above within the budget:
KORG PA80 (used), KORG PA60
Yamaha PSR2000
Unless I am missing something ?

I have ruled out CASIO MZ2000, Yamaha PSR740 already.

I purchased a PA60 about 3 weeks ago and i have been extremely pleased with it in virtually every aspect of it. I initially bought this as a 2nd keyboard to go with my X1, but i have been using the PA60 much more than my X1 recently!

The styles are excellent and amongst the best i've ever heard (and ive owned virtually every make of keyboard at one time or another), they are certainly very realistically arranged and sound real. They even give some of my X1's patterns a run for their money! The PA's styles are very professional and have been arranged to suite so many types of music. Most of the intros and endings are excellent and stand out in a big way. Its one of those keyboards where you can select a style, and bang, you immediately think of a song you can play with it, and when you do, it sounds very believable. You asked about fill ins, it has only 2 which is a little surprising, but i think they are acceptable.

The sounds on the Korg are very good as well, obviously some sounds are better than others which i guess is the same on every keyboard. My favourite sound on the PA60 so far is the Jazz Guitar, it sounds so much like one. Synths and strings are excellent as they blend in with the music very well. And thats something ive noticed with the PA60, the way sounds blend with each other, seems so balanced and mellow sounding, where as some other keyboards can tend to sound harsh at times unless you adjust certain effects and volume. The Korg is virtually spot on with its balance leaving you very little to do in the mixer whilst playing. I have not been through all of the sounds yet, im still feeling my way into the keyboard. Put it this way, this is how good i think it is: Previously when i used to own certain keyboards, on some of them it took me about a day or 2 to go through all the sounds and styles simply because i would hear something and soon bypass it thinking "yes its ok, yes not bad, yes its passable, yes its usable" without finding anything actually attractive or exceptional, and sometimes it becomes forgettable. With the PA60, especially on the styles section, i keep having a "wow that is amazing" feeling, and i tend to go back to the same style and play something else with it, and it goes on. I have not even been through all the onboard styles yet so i can't wait to see what else is in store for me! Thats how good this keyboard is i think.

Some of the sounds that really stand out are:

Guitars
Strings/Synths
Electric Pianos
Accordions

Again, i have not really tried everything yet to the extent where i can comment on them. Saxes sound fine when browsing through them, but not used them enough to judge.

Possibly the best feature of this keyboard in terms of sounds are the drum kits. They are very realistic, and im some cases outperform some from the X1.

My favourite style so far is HalfTimeBld, simply awesome to perform with.

As for the Harmonizer, someone like Uncle Dave can possibly answer your query as i dont have it installed on the PA60 (if it actually can be that is).

Overall though, I am very pleased with the PA60 because its certainly given me far more value for money than i first thought. Its fairly easy to use, the only thing i didnt like about it is the mixer, its pretty fiddly. But you get used to it i suppose. But when your getting quality of its kind, i tend to forgive its shortcomings!

Unfortunately, i cannot comment on anything regarding the PSR2000 as i have not used anything by Yamaha since owning the PSR8000 5 years ago.

Good luck with your findings!

Danny

[This message has been edited by DannyUK (edited 09-29-2002).]

Hi
about middle price arrangers, I have seen and listened three: Korg PA 80/60, Ketron XD9, and PSR2000. I will say something about my opinion:

Korg PAs have two times more Mb for sounds than PSR, a hundred styles more (and better ones), and two clear advantages:
first, you may load new voices (if you dont like its piano voice, you have new piano voices on the net to be downloaded
two, you may erase inner styles and put your own styles.
So, you may "made" PA kb as you want.

XD9 is also a great keyboard, it has beautiful sounds (great piano voice, f.e.) and sounds..

By the other side, PSR has a great plus: its vocal harmonizer; and it seems easier to navigate. But it seems also a little "toy", keys filmy plastic, etc.

In my opinion, Korg and Ketron are "more" kbs than PSR2000. But you say, Yamahas are more popular, and more help on the net for them.
Cheers

lukitoh,
I just sold my PA 80 a couple of weeks ago and I want to focus in on a couple of things you said and what the others have said too.

The fills on the PA's are not very good and they do not blend near as well as Yamaha do, many over on another PA forum have complained about this and there are only 2. I've owned both boards. As far as a vocal harmonizer, the Tyros that is coming out is the first I've heard of that can actually follow the pacing of your voice (I could be wrong and there may be some other one that will do this but not that I know of).

You can in fact overwrite the factory styles on one and that is a very cool feature, but you cannot overwrite the voices and there are only two banks that you can load new voices into.

The drum kits are debatable, personally I liked them but many complained, mostly those doing dance type music that they didn't have enough guts behind them.

I would disagree, in my opinion that the styles are better on the PA than on Yamahas. Availability of new factory styles for the PA was non existent until just in the last week. I would expect if history is any judge any new ones beyond these will be a long long time in coming. Yamahs have tons and tons of available styles on the net, as do Rolands.

The PA's are quite a bit more difficult to navigate than are Yamahas, when editing and the like. Some of the global parameters are not savable either, for instance if you want the speakers off, because you play through an amp, it will not save this, they default to on, or if you want to do a midi setup that you use all the time, with certain channels set for certain things, it will not allow you to save those either. It's not a bad board, but does have to me some idiosyncracies that I found annoying.

Lastly, at $1500.00, you can find a very good board, but a great board I think may be pushing it. I think the great board with some of the higher end features you mentioned are more like in the $2500.-$3000.00 range.
Terry

Well, PA arrangers have another plus, that is my free PRM utility for styles management. Check it out!



[This message has been edited by RicFreak (edited 09-30-2002).]

This is not completely true except in one situation. If you write your Globals settings they will be recalled when you power on again with the exception of things like the speakers On and a couple of other parameters. You can also save Globals to Disk and load them.

The situation terry is refering to is when you create a custom Globals set up then select one of the Default MIDI setups in the Pa. There is no way to recall your custom setup from that point unless you either load a Global file from disk or turn the Pa off then on again.

Unless you are flipping your MIDI configs alot, it is a minor beef and again you can just load them from disk. I personally have never found it an issue but also think being able to flip back to the last config prior to selecting a default would be a nice feature for the those who would be doing that.

The origonal quote here is misleading, it gives the impression you can not save globals at all, which is not the case. You can, you just can not toggle between the defaults and anything custom that you make on the fly.

bidump,
I'm not sure the original quote about the globals is misleading. The speakers default to on, there is no way to save this setting to on....period.
Now, let's talk about the midi setups....if you have 2 midi setups that you use in the PA, there is no way to save both those setups INSIDE the PA. Having to load floppies is one of those idiosyncracies I spoke of. And for me, which is whose experience with the PA I was speaking of, I do use different midi setups for different modules that I have. In my Triton Rack I use about 6 different setups, depending on what it is I am trying to do.

But looking for middle ground here....the only way to save some global parameters is to floppy. Better?

Now the real true statement said here is about RicFreaks program for managing styles....PRM...it is in fact a great program he developed and works as good or better than any program I have ever used for anything.
Terry

I'm not sure why you have ruled out the 740 lukitoh, but if it is because of the sounds and / or the styles, then it's quite possible that you would also rule out the PSR2000 as well if you try it. The 2000 is an improvement over the 740 in several areas, ( and in your case one of the criteria being a better vocal harmonizer ), but other than a few new voices and styles, the two boards don't sound a lot different. I may get some argument on that, but I owned both and that was my experience with them.

The PA80s VH can follow the chord structure of either the left hand chords or what is played with the right hand, depending on how you set it up.

The weak point of the PA80 for me is that there are only 2 fills per style, and there are a few styles that don;t have the best fills for all 4 variations. That being said though, most of the style variations consist of 8 bar loops and many of the variations have subtle fills in the 8th and sometimes 4th measure as well. There are plenty of styles available for both the PSR and PA series boards, and Korg recently released some new styles, some of which are very good.

I found that the 2000 is pretty much a wysiwyg board in that, if you like what it is "out of the box", great, because there isn't a lot you can do to change it. The PA80 allows for better voice editing, and it has some very good sounds to start with ( yes I've even managed to get a pretty good piano sound with the stock samples in the board ), It also allows for replacement of the factory styles. The PA80 seems to be a bit more difficult to understand at first for some of the players who have tried both ( me included ),but once I learned the OS I found it to be very well laid out and easy to navigate.

I'm not sure what the Ketron XD9 is going for ( DanO could answer that one ), but from what I've heard and seen of it, it's also certainly at least worth a look. I've only heard some demos, but they were good enough that the XD9 has gotten my attention and I am looking forward to trying one soon .

I agree that the midi setup is cumbersome and I wish that I could save more than one custom setup on the board, but then again, as was pointed out, saving my global setups to a floppy works fine as well. I'm not 100 % sure, because it has been awhile since I had the 2000, but I don't believe that there was any way to save custom midi setups in it at all.

AJ

[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 09-30-2002).]

lukitoh,
Here's something I can tell you...you can take AJ's post here to the "bank" there's very few people I know of that know the PA and some of the other boards as well as AJ does. So if you are trying to decide who's opinion has the most weight here, I'd go with AJ's.
jam on,
Terry

PA-80 is the combination of a very synthesizer, arranger and sequencer.

other arrangers keyboards would skim on sound editing, sequencing features.

PA-80 is a full fledged synthesizer and sequencer also. It has the same capabilities as TRITON. Both the sound editing features and sequencing is same in Pa-80 and TRITON. You could play sounds from TRITON on PA-80.

If you are also looking for making your own sounds and sequencing you own songs, go for PA-80 /60.