After 3 hours of driving from San Diego to George Kaye's store in Reseda, we finally got my VA-7 upgraded to version 2.

I got George to sweat a little since Roland gave no directions on how to recalibrate the touchscreen but he managed to get my keyboard upgraded after all, both operating system and variphrase.

Version 2 is well worth the trip. Besides the Music Assistant which I was really looking forward to, I can now play Variphrase on my left hand.
V2 also have a programmable lyrics for standard midi, useful feature to import text files and sync to the midi song as lyrics.
The metronome volume can also be adjusted if you can stand the loud click.
More importantly, all four layers lower1, lower2, upper1 and upper2 can be switched on/off from the main page, which adds lots of convenience. All fours layers can be played simultaneously as well.

As for the style, if the Original/Variation button is pressed twice, I can now switch between Basic and Advanced levels (I don't have to navigate through the orchestrator screen and then select advanced/basic any longer !).

Great stuffs on this version 2, adds a new level of interest to the VA7 in my opinion !

Very cool George !

Claude

"V2 also have a programmable lyrics for standard midi, useful feature to import text files and sync to the midi
song as lyrics."

can you elaborate on this feature a little bit?

No kidding I was sweating. I thought i was going to have to give Claude a new VA7 for a minute. After we loaded the two disks worth of software, the keyboard went into a mode where we had to calibrate the screen. I couldn't figure out what to do to make it calibrate. The screen kept saying to press this point and I would press it and nothing happened. Thank goodness Claude tried it and he realized you had to press and keep holding the spot until it told you to move to another spot. After we figured this out we moved on to loading the new variphrase presets. What I discovererd was that you had to put disk number 2 of the operating system back into the floppy drive and then it would begin loading. Without this disk in, an error kept showing up in the display. Again I was sweating!!! Finally, I had it, or so I thought, until I looked at the one touch settings and much to my dismay, they were all empty. Claude kept saying it was ok because the new music assistant was all he needed, but I knew something was wrong. I couldn't understand. Then, all of a sudden, a bell went off in my head and I remembered that you can program your own one touch settings and I went to the zip drive and loaded in the file called factory as a set up, and yes,,,,,,,,,the one touch settings came back.
All I can say is thank you Claude for your patience with me on Saturday. Someone else might have started demanding a new keyboard and not given me the chance to figure things out. I called Roland on Monday and told them about their incomplete directions. Oh well, live and learn.......
Enjoy your new version.
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California

George,
the best way to calibrate the touch screen is to use a pen (a finger is simply too large and the calibration process requires that you press a well definite, very small point).
Claude, have you tried the new user programs yet?
Almost 1000 of them to try out and they are all brand new!
Donny, version 2 lets you incorporate lyrics into a midifile; I have never tried that feature because I don't sing, but I think it's useful if you like to read the lyrics of a song while you play.

Hi Andrea,

I've started to explore the new user programs, they are pretty cool !
I'm using the music assistant mainly to get more ideas to which sound to combine with which rhythm. The "O Sole Mio" that George showed me on saturday was particularly good. It combines variphrase on the left hand and has some pretty cool presets for the D-Beam.

Now I wish we could import more sounds the same way we import rhythms on the VA7

Claude

Claude,
if you got the "O sole mio" program in California, I begin to think that those user programs are the same everywhere. Did you check all those Shadows guitars (Hank's Cavatina, Hank's Shadows, Perfidja, etc?).
I agree that it would be great to have some spare RAM to import new samples (and of course be able to save them on an hard disk...)

What about those of us who have the VA5??? The parts control through the main screen, and the basic/advanced control via the buttons are very usefull. Have you heard anything about it? I just got my VA5 yesterday and just by playing with it for a few hours, I noticed that these 2 things would be great. The basic/advanced transition can be assigned to a foot switch so it wouldn't be a problem. But the parts are very convinient. If they could make the one touch tones accessible in a simpier way it'd be perfect!