Thanks to Mart & Ironhill for your explainantions. It helps clarify a number points.

Mart when you state external memory (250Mg), are you talking about a PC card ( i.e. compact flash,smart media, memory stck)? I suppose then one could tweak & create many styles and store them on several PC cards. Changing cards when you need them. This would make number of styles that you have at your finger tips enormous. Am i interpreting this correctly?

I suppose one could also store midi files and sequences on these cards? Do you know how many sequences ( either notes or songs) or midi files one could fit on a 250 Mg card?

Are 250Mg cards the largest that will fit in the G-70 slot?


Regards;
BN

No, you can use the biggest Card you have 4 Gbytes and now more than 8 Gbytes exits. Microdrive can be used too to store styles, midifiles, etc...
Hope that the new version of the OS can read mp3 et other good things.

Hi Spalding and John Smies!
I'm musician in Brazil, my name is Marcos Vampa.
I'm looking for information about G70 and I found thid forum.
And I found two other foruns, with diferent opinions, one good, another bad.
When you say " through the same set up" what do you mean?
I ask it because keyboards with built in speakers always sound worst when plugged on an external amplifier and speakers. Recently I had a great disappointment with PA50 because of it, so I sold it. PA1X and Tyros have built in speakers an G70 don't. (well... sorry my english...). And
My interest in Roland arranger keyboards is because there many brazilian styles for them, and styles that sound very similar to the reality of our music, different of other manufacturers, that have a "outside look" to us.
If G70 have an inteligent style edition, and if it sounds at least like a Roland XP80 or a Korg i3 that's enough for me.
What fo you think?

Thanks,
Marcos Vampa

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Marcos Vampa
Rio
Brazil

the shop i went into had the korg pa1x , the tyros and the G70. The tyros and G70 do not have built in speakers and the korg does. I tried all three through the same mixing desk. I am not a technical person when it comes to setting up demos with equipment i am unfamiliar with but the store owner who helped set up the mixer and amplification is. The Korg quite clearly sounded better simply in tonality and fidelity. You will find a common theme with posts about the G70. The sounds straight from the box have far too much effects on them. So eg the piano sounds like you can here it in a large room from a distance. That was just one example and unfortunately there were many. If you like latin styles do not spend £000's on a keyboard simply for that.Styles are easily bought on the net or provided freely from other net resources with a little tweaking. But i would suggest that your focus should be on the actual quality of sound and usefulness of the keyboard features. I focused on the sound. To me thats the selling point of any musical instrument. Value for money is important and functionality but thats not the primary concern. If it were i would buy a casio ( I am just creating enemies left right and centre here...no offence to casio owners!!) What i am saying is that you need to try out these boards yourself if you can find a distributor and make up your own mind. But as a consumer and a genuine potential buyer of Roland products, Roland are making it too hard for me to find something to like about the G70 right from the outset. And from what i have read , by limiting its distribution to certain outlets , they are making it difficult to actually buy their products too....

Hi BlkNotes,
My external memory is not full yet so I can
not tell you how much styles and midifiles
a 250MB card can place.
My external memorycard has now more than
1500 styles and still has plenty of room for
another 1000 I think.
All these styles are direct playable and it
takes no time to load.

I am wondering if this is a (recent?) Roland habit. Although my current instrument is a Roland VA-76, this was equally a very hard instrument to like on first aquaintance. Frankly, it sounded terrible straight out of the box. Again, part of the problem was the same drowning of everything in totally OTT reverb and FX.

Although it can be made to sound much better by cleaning the sound up drastically (e.g. back off the reverb and - in some cases - completely remove the factory choice of insert FX) I would have to say that this revealed the "dry" sounds to be of inferior quality compared with - say - any Korg arranger of the last 10 years.

To be fair, sounds are subjective & like most instruments some sounds in the VA are better than others & the very good ones are as good as any. However, the general average quality is more consistent with a £500 instrument than a £2000+ instrument and I just wonder if Roland were deliberately drowning the thing in reverb to make it sound more impressive in the showroom.

I sincerely hope that this is not the reason with the G-70 as it is still on my list as a possible.

Hi everybody
Hi Spalding

The question is that Roland make styles that are really brazilian. They sound very close to our musical feeling. Korg, Yamaha, and others, don't do it sucessfully. They provide us with stuff they THINK brazilian music is. The simple fact the keyboard manufacturers situates brazilian music under the "Latin Music" label shows up how they don't know what our music really is, and how the styles should sound. But Roland have a special politcs to brazilian music, they have a different way to approach it. The result is: the best styles to play our music, brazilian
music, not "latin" music. Maybe it's hard to foreigners understand, hear, see this differences, but to us they are very clear. In the same way is almost impossible for many brazilian musician see differences between american pop rock and english pop rock, grunge and heavy metal, rock and rythm blues etc. Roland provide dozens of samba, forro, axe, choro and others good brazilians styles, the others offers 3 or 4 poor styles
I, as you, buy keyboards considering it's sound, but, considering Roland have a huge users community working and producing brazilian styles, and considering that their converted styles don't sound so good when played on others keyboards (Korg, Yamaha, etc) I want try G70 . If I will be very very disappointed, wel... maybe a XV-5080 as a tone generator could help. But it means spend more money...
What do you think?

Thanks : )
(and sorry my english)
Marcos Vampa

Marcos, I bought a 5080 to use as a sound generator with my G1000...
The 5080 could not handle the midi data from the G1000 very well..it had lags and glitches..It definately is the problem of the 5080...I used other sources for sounds without problems[XP80, JV1010 and naturally all the GS instruments from Roland]..
Just a word of caution,,try the combination of your arranger and the 5080 first..before you commit to buying a 5080 for that purpose..
I loved the 5080 for what it does,but it didn't work well with my arranger..

Fran, I have a JV-1080, I use it with a EXR7 to improve the final sound. But in the GM mode EXR7 can't access all the GM Drum Kits, it's limited to Standard and Brush Set. Do you know a way EXR7 can use all JV1080 GM Drum Kits?
And what is the best GM/GS instruments you used wuth G1000?

Thank You
Marcos Vampa

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Marcos Vampa
Rio
Brazil

Marcos, the GM drum kit will only give you the two drumsets..
Actually any of the GS modules will work, but none sound better than the G1000 engine...with the exception of the VA7 used as a sound source.
The GS instruments will give you a mininum of 9 drumkits..

You may be able to disable the GM reset, and set up a performance to use as a playback for arranger or sequences..