I'd just like to post on the original thrust of this topic.

I find it unbelievable that ANYONE expects ANY keyboard to sound perfect out-of-the-box (OOTB). Your perfect isn't my perfect..... my perfect is probably not yours!
What is disturbing is the number of people who think that an instrument of the G-70's complexity should power-up and be exactly the way they like it. I have used RA90's G800 and currently G1000 for15 years and NONE of them sounded the way I liked OOTB.

HOWEVER............ all of them could be made perfect with effort. Yes, effort...... seemingly something that some of you are unwilling to use. No professional would buy a Fantom Xa or a Kurzweil 2600 or a Triton Extreme and expect it to be perfect OOTB. Many of them would consider it essential to re-program EVERY sound that they use to put their own stamp on it. Sound A works with Sound B, but not if Sound C is present, e.g., hence effort.

I can imagine the Italian arranger players hearing an American voiced G-70 going 'This s*cks, it sounds like it's in an anechoic chamber!' and all of us here in the States going 'well, just turn up the reverb....' Effort........ that we apparently don't want to make ourselves.

The Arranger mentality seems to be 'Power up and go' but when you are dealing with a keyboard as powerful as a G-70 or PA1Xpro (essentially a Fantom X or a Triton) this ought to be 'Power up and edit' to get the best from it. There are posts here complaining of 'hidden' sounds!! Geez! Most of us call them variations and the more, the better! Many of the G1000/8000's better sounds are the variation, not the 'capital' sounds. This is for SMF compatibility, so when your SMF plays in my keyboard, patch 67 calls up a Tenor Sax, NOT a Breathy Tenor or a Tenor Ensemble or whatever else you consider the BEST Tenor Sax. If you meant those sounds, you would have used the CC32 bank change to get it. Effort....

Instead of auditioning a keyboard by listening to all the presets and judging from those, a far better way to discern the long-term usefulness of a keyboard is to take ONE preset and spend an hour seeing how much you can change it. You will have a MUCH better idea of how happy you will be in the long run (which, in the case of a $4000 keyboard, better be a DAMN long time!)

One final thought for you......... many of the posts here give a thumbs-up to the action of the G-70, but it seems to be an aside. I can't emphasize how important this is in the long run. During the tourist season here in Florida, I often do 2 or sometimes even 3 gigs a day - 8-10hrs of playing a day. No other key bed I have ever played has ever had the control and comfort of this one - no sharp corners to catch your hands on during organ smears, sufficient weight to play accurately, but not enough to be fatiguing, enough cushioning at the bottom of the key travel to avoid shocking your wrists and finger joints, and incredible reliability (if you use a good flight case, as all should!).
If you play or practice a LOT, this should be of close to paramount importance (can you say Carpal Tunnel?) Two BIG thumbs up - without pain!!

Anyway – rant off. Please make judgments but don’t define them as the ONE TRUTH, we’ve got a government here in the States to do that for us! And don’t make judgments if you haven’t even played one of the damn things……… Geez!!

And that's the truth.
Well said!

Why should I spend 4000$ and put it an "effort". Hallo?!? I d rather prefer arranger for 1000$ without big effort. Why should I spend hours and hours hard work for nothing, becouse arranger never sounds like a real band and thats all the same sheet. I d rather spend hours for practising new songs not for turning knobs. And I dont need thousents tenor saxs, i need one or two but good one without turning knobs. Sorry for my english.

Diki,
Nobody ever had complains on the keyboard-keybed quality of this machine. Most of us would accept a machine sounding almost perfect, a little tweaking to adjust to personal taste is normal.
Some people say in this case it just takes too much time to make it sound acceptable.

I owned Technics, Solton, Ketron and now Tyros..... none of them required any tweaking in sounds or styles for my taste.
(OOTB) Those manufacturers just know how instruments should sound in specific styles/environments.
E.g. What I strongly dislike is the 'distance-miking' effect in the G70, what makes it sound like in a bathroom....

Diki i dont know about you but i buy a keyboard to play not to sound edit. If i wanted to sound edit i would buy an out and out synth!!! That does not mean that i wont tweak sounds or if i have the time really dig into the keyboard but NOONE SHOULD BUY A KEYBOARD THAT THEY HAVE TO TWEAK JUST FOR THE SOUND TO BE ACCEPTABLE ! Thats complete madness and if thats what your into i have a casio here that i will sell to you for £1000 that you can tweeak to your hearts desire. Maybe you can make it sound better than the £300 keyboard that it was new !!

Worse still , noone should by a £3500 keyboard that sounds like my £300 casio !!!

I cannot ever remember hearing anyone make so many complaints about a keybooards general sound.

George tested the G70 and he said it was fine. I respect his opinion on the unit he had. I have tested the instrunmemt myself on two separate occasions and i wont mince my words , it sounded rubbish. But that was the unit i had tried. It had nothing to do with sound preference, i like korg, yams and rolands. This was a crap product full stop. Dont tell me that i should be spending hours of my time messing about with £000's of hitech junk to make it sound good!

Thats right Spalding.

And then we wonder why arrangers have such a bad name. When I buy a keyboard for over 3500, I want something that 4-5 years down the line I can change to my liking,

One thing I would say this discussion has done is to make me want to demo the G70. When the spects first came out last year, I was not even going to look at it because it did not have a sampler.

But with the differing opinions on sounds (which is just one thing on the G70) I really want to demo the keyboard.


It is really hard for me to believe that a flag ship arranger could be given such a low rating by some people. I want to know if it is the people who don't know what good sounds are or the people just have different sound likings or the people have a negative way to roland and a positive slant to other brands or it is just the keyboard.

It all boils down to a matter of taste isn't it?

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't want to have to edit sounds just to make them as they "should" be. Why? I just don't know how and maybe I am too lazy to learn now.

But in my naivette, and not having touched a G70, I believe that a keyboard should sound "good" (whatever that means for anyone here) right out of the box, so I can play, as Spalding wants.

I also believe that Roland can make a product sound "good" just like a producer makes a CD "sound good" for the majority of listeners. Some would like a little more overdrive guitar in song No3, and some would like to add some reverb to the vocals in song No15 but generally the producer wants to please the most and acts accordingly.

From the posts here, and elsewhere in the forum, it seems that Roland's "producers" didn't do that, or am I missing something?

In this page, we seem to have two different opinions: (I didn't dare look in the previous pages)
Diki and To the Genesys want the master tapes of song No3 so they can remix to their hearts content, Vano and Spalding, just want to pop the CD in the player and listen. I would probably want the same.

Is anyone of us wrong or right here? I don't know. Why the hell did I write all this? I don't know either

Theodore

Dead right. The first true arranger I owned was a Korg i3 - bought for portability to replace the last of a series of enormous Yamaha Electone organs (which I liked a lot). The Korg sounded great straight out of the box, and the more you delved into it, the more impressed you became.

I now have a VA-76. It sounded crap when I first heard it, as did all it's VA relatives. After three years of "fine tuning" the thing, it sounds better - now just "poor" as opposed to "crap".

That is not to say that it wasn't the right choice - it has certain functionality that I particularly wanted - but no matter what you do, it ultimately sounds like a £500 keyboard rather than one that costs over 4 times that price.

A good example is the drum sounds. The old Korg only had 8 kits - but they were 8 good kits - each with a choice of 4 snare drums and 4 bass drums which you could freely swap out. In contrast, the Roland boasts 128 kits, none of which ever seems to be quite what you are looking for. With the Korg, I coud always find a kit with a snare and bass-drum combination that sounded just right for whatever song I was arranging. With the Roland I seem to spend hours trying to get the drums to sound anything other than gutless and mushy - usually giving up and accepting somthing that I am not really satisfied with.

Whilst I accept that different makers have their own characteristic sound - and that is a good thing - the fundamental difference I am describing here is that the old Korg sounded like a "pro" instrument straight out of the box, while the Roland VA sounds "1980s home organ" no matter what you do to it.

In summary, I think that Spalding is dead right. To be worth buying, any instrument needs to sound good straight out of the box, but then to be capable of being tweaked to suit personal tastes and different styles of music. Just how good, and how versatile, will depend on the price you pay - but I would rather have a simple instrument that sounds "right" than one which can do everything, but does it all badly.......

After hearing the tyros....I can never buy the G70...... My friend at a local music shop tells me to buy the G70 because the tyros looks like a toy... and I told him that it may look like a toy but it sounds awesome...

I hate the G70 sounds. They suck. Even when the salesguy applied DSP effects it sucked.

I particularly love the flute,sax, accordion,harmonica strings sounds on the Tyros....on the G70 these sounds sound absolutely crap....

Even my friend said " Wow... How come the Tyros Soprano sax sounds so real and this Roland one sounds useless"