Intro's & Endings....Unfortunately most manufactures spend a lot of time on the Intro's & endings to impress the punters, this sells keyboards, but very often drops flat from the Intro when going into a style. I use the intro's only when friends call I want to impress, other wise starting with a fill is the best bet or I often save an Intro into a Registration with just Drums & Bass and build up the other registrations to suit.

Graham UK

Donny,you can play an intro live but how on earth would you play an ending? I mean all you can do on This board is try to hit "stop" right on the beat and make it sound smooth--or do the fade-out with a foot pedal. I agree with Graham that a showy ending is of limited use,which is why I cannot understand the omission of a simple ending option. I think Roland REALLY blew it on this issue!

I do use the intros and endings that I think work well with a particular song. I use piano and guitar for keyboard playing mostly and I play the part right along with the endings and intros.

Sometimes with standards I play the last four bars of a tune for the intro. If the longer endings do not work I use the simple endings. If neither ending sounds right for the tune, I do use the fade button.

Sometimes the intro and endings are perfect for the tunes I play. But many tunes you just have to improvise intros and endings, No keyboard will do everything.

I'll admit it is time consuming to learn what you can do with a board if your going to use the arranger parts. Uncle Dave's got it made. He sings great. All he needs is drums bass and right hand chords.He can use a Casio and sound great. ( Unless he only sings "She" that good.HA!HA!) He just has the natural voice.

I'm a sax player. I need all the help I can get. I even have to type out the lyrics for most tunes. Dave doesn't even own any loose leaf paper.HA! HA! again!!

Dave why don't you send me a tape. I'd love to listen to you sing some other tunes. Especially some old standards.

I'm waaaaay overdue for a new demo. I think I'll start recording some of these "stripped down" shows for you guys. It'll show you another way to utilize an arranger keyboard and still maintain a fresh sound.
The reason it works well for me is because I sing so much. My voice is clearly the feature, so it really doesn't matter much what's going on behind it. Between the 5 part harmonies, and the bass and drums .... there's a lot going on already. The arranger just adds "fluff", and that's nice every now and then too.
I'll work on some songs real soon.

Never touched a VA series, but can you do custom styles on it? Sometimes I create a custom style on my PSR8000 just to have an intro/ending that suits the song I'm doing.

Actually you can record your own Intros-endings and save them as a new style, but this is the hard way around!