8mb for the sounds. Wow thats alot!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lol

8mb's isn't too bad.. Is that 8mb's used for the panel voices, XG, and GM together???? I would assume this board would go up against the PSR-550. My only thing is will this board be capable of recording a user style. I see under the specs from G. Kaye that 19 of the styles are changable. It would be a shame if this keyboard didn't offer any type of loop recording for custom styles. Even my old Yamaha PSR-540 did loop recording for styles.

Squeak

The specs say 20 programable styles. Is that programable or changeable. Big Differnece.
Would that be programable on the board or off? Don't know. THe EXR-5 has a lot of buttons, but they are for different functions, not for voice and mixer changes as on the PSR550. The price point would place it against the PSR550, but Roland can't match Yamaha's "Sweet voices". Roland's flute is unuseable IMO and Yamaha's is excellent. I never use the flute on my Roland EM.
Starkeeper

[This message has been edited by Starkeeper (edited 02-05-2004).]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Dnj:
[B]why didnt your like the Triton extreme piano video shown..?

Hey Donny,

I enjoyed the short piano samples from the Korg but I was wondering what you thought of the piano sound on the Roland Fantom X? I thought it had a very nice mellow, warm sound.

http://trio.harmony-central.com/ramgen/WNAMM04/Roland-Fantom-X.rm

mike

Very nice. We sometimes debate here as to what piano voices you like, and we say it's subjective. Do you prefer the Roland piano voice or Yamaha piano voice, but the question to ask is which one comes closest to sounding like a real accoustic piano.
This is very close to the real thing.
Starkeeper

Ok, now it's my turn :-) I bought the EXR-5 two weeks ago, and I could find so little about this new gear on the web, I also made a "Userpage" for it at www.exr5.tk - On that page I wrote my review, which I will paste here now for your amusement

The new Roland EXR-5 (and it's brother EXR-3) are, according to Roland, the arranger keyboards with the best sounds available at Roland today. Let me give you my opinion after having this keyboard for a week

Before I bought this one, I owned the EM-25, and I particularly like the fact that Roland seems to have "fixed" some of the things -I- thought were the "downsides" of the EM-25 model.

To mention a few things: The EXR-5 has a pitchbender/modulation-stick (EM25 had none), seperate Left/Right jack-outputs, two headphone-outputs in the front of the keyboard, the diskdrive is mounted in the middle of the board (the EM-25 had it on the right side, which caused some trouble when you put it on a stand) and the EXR-5 has a normal analogue volume-knob (the EM-25 had two buttons +/- that worked on the MIDI-volume 0-127)

Enough comparison though, let's talk about the EXR-5 some more.

For the full technical specs I'd like to refer to the Roland website, since it's not really meaningful to repeat the brochure here

Overall
I liked this board the moment I saw it. It has a less "toy-ish" look than the EM-series, well-designed buttons, lit buttons where it's handy to have them, and a clear and well-designed display. But does it work well?

Working with sounds
Selecting sounds is easy on this new model. No more fiddling about with A and B-banks, just key in the number of the patch (you'll learn them by heart quick enough ) and off you go. To help you select them, the EXR-5 has 8 buttons to select "families" of sounds. From there, you can browse through the sounds within that "family"... but not all of them! For some odd reason, Roland decided that we didn't have to be able to browse through ALL the sounds. If you want sounds outside the GM2/GS range, you have to look up the patchnumber on the (included) patcheslist and key it in on the numeric keypad. Weird.

Also, the numeric keypad is designed like a telephone keypad. I.e the 1 is on the upper left corner, the 9 lower-righ corner. I find this highly unlogical. Maybe because I'm used to my numeric keypad on a computer keyboard (with the 1 on lower-left, 9 on upper-right) but I guess I'll just have to get used to it.

Quality of the sounds
This is truly one great sounding keyboard! Great pianos (coming from Roland's RD-series), fabulous guitars and even the brass-section is finally sounding "natural" (love that breath-sax!). Organsounds from "cool organ" to filthy raw rockorgans, it's all there. Being a drummer originally, I am quite difficult to please when it comes to drumsounds. But the EXR-5 did not disappoint me at all. Some of the kits I find really awful, (like the TR-kits) but that may also be caused by the fact that I don't like house-like electronic music that much - I'm getting old, I guess

When playing the drums manually (yes I do that ) it's great to find that Roland has combined the two snaresounds (D-key E-key) so that you can play your snare as if you had a real one. They are not two different snaresounds, but one "normal hit" and one "rimshot/head combination coming from the same snare (in standard kits). If you can play the drums manually, you'll like this feature.

Nothing negative to mention about the sounds?

Oh yes, sure. I don't know why they did it, but Roland has moved some of the standard GS/GM2 sounds to other patchnumbers and replaced them with new sounds. In other words: Program number 49 used to be "normal quick strings", and now it's a new kind of strings. This causes old compositions you carefully put together (in MIDI) to sound real weird sometimes. It also took me a while to "re-find" that old strings-sound I was so used to. Found it in a whole different patchnumber, and not before I turned off the chorus on that patch. The same goes for the brass-section sounds. I used to have quick attacking, bright and non-chorussed brass-sections in the EM-25 and older boards, Roland has made new brass-sections and put them in place of the old ones.

In other words: some of the "improved" sounds make you wonder where that "neutral" sound has gone. But of course, if this is your first board you won't have a problem with it.

Styles
Now let's have a look at the "Intelligent Arranger" side of this EXR-5. It's easy to use, first of all. The display tells you very well what is selected and what is not and while playing, the well-arranged buttons make it easy to switch from original to fills, variations, intros and ending. The Cover-function is quite nice too. Some quite "harsh" sounding arrangements suddenly sound real smooth when using the "Accoustic" cover, too cheesy sounding Ballad-arrangements get just enough extra "spice" when using them with the "Pop"-cover (or even "Rock" cover). This way you can use the 119 different styles in more than 700 different ways... there MUST be one style you can use

Recording
The EXR-5 has an on-board 16 track sequencer. This of course is great when you have that sudden burst of inspiration, but someone else is using your computer (sound familiar? ) Just turn on the EXR-5, press REC and record what you want. The sequencer can record all MIDI-channels at once, or channel-by-channel. This way you can record using the arranger first, and replace parts of the arrangement afterwards.
Downside: Recording only starts using the START/STOP button, so you can't just let the metronome click away while you play your own drums.
Of course you can save your recording and import it in your computer-sequencer later to work with it.

"Physical" quality
I think it's all well-constructed. Good keys, like I'm used to have on Roland keyboards, a well-responding pitchbender that does not feel like it will break when handled "too rough", all buttons on the panel respond well, although I wouldn't mind if they responded to a little less pressure. When selecting a new sound, you need to press the three numeric buttons quite firmly or you'll end up with a whole different sound than the one you meant to select...

The speakers on the EXR-5 are wonderful. It has a bass-reflex system, so you can enjoy the really good sounds without having to connect it to an external amp or speakerset. The "grills" on the speakers are made of metal and are mounted well so they won't rattle at any time, even when you're playing that low keys on the fretless bass. In fact, nothing rattles while playing, even though the keyboard produces real deep bass-sounds. Good job!

Connections
Just a few words on the connectivity of the EXR-5: Using the USB cable that comes with the board, you can connect the keyboard to your computer. It will show up as an external harddisk, and allows you to easily transfer MIDI-files, userprograms and styles to and from the 1,5 MB Flash-memory in the EXR-5. This way you don't even need the diskdrive! (To make sure you want the EXR-5 instead of the diskdrive-less EXR-3, Roland has given the EXR-5 a better soundsystem (bassreflex) than the EXR-3 )

Conclusion The decision to trade in my EM-25 for this EXR-5 was quite an impulsive one, but so far I don't regret it at all. It will take me some time to get used to the sounds and to discover where the best sounds for my compositions are located, but so far it's been real fun to play the EXR-5.

Great review! Almost makes me want one.
Thanks,
DonM

Burkels,
A very good detailed review.
Can you answer some of the question asked by me and Squeak_D:
1. When I demoed the accoustic piano it sounded digital. Was I using the wrong patch number? (You answered my question as to where are all the other voices accessed). What patch number is the acoustic grand piano?
2. Can you respond to my question about the Leslie sim. It's not on all the organ voices, can that be added using DSP?
3. Can you record styles?
4. How many custom styles can you store, is it 19,20 or as much as will fill the flash ROM, or 20 plus flash ROM?
5. Can you apply the DSP to voices, and if so, how many?
On my Yamaha PSR550 styles are kept alive by a battery. Roland uses flash ROM, which is really progressive. No hard drive, no battery, no SD card, good job Roland.
When I demoed the EXR-5 the percussive organ was very good, with Leslie sim as well.
Starkeeper

[This message has been edited by Starkeeper (edited 02-06-2004).]

Accoustic Grand should be patch 001. Although the speakers on the EXR-5 are very good, they may not have been able to convince you of the pianosound Hook it up to a good amp or use a headphone, and try again. I think the grand sounds good, better than the sound it had on my "old" EM-25.

You can assign the MFX-module to ROTARY on any patch you want. Using the MODULATION bender, you can switch between fast and slow rotary.

No, the EXR-models do not have style-recording or -editing capabilities.

Well, that confused me too, since I read in my manual that the limit is 19 userstyles, but George mentioned up to 99 Userstyles in flashmemory. So I simply started loading styles into the memory, and indeed you can just go on saving styles to Flash until the 1,5 MB is full.

I guess you mean by DSP what Roland calls "Multi Effects" or MFX. You can assign one of the 47 different MFX to the MAIN-part of the keyboard (i.e. the upper hand, channel 4). This means you can not assign different effects to the other parts of the style. The MFX setting ONLY applies to the MAIN part. (Roland really needs to hire someone who can write useful manuals. It took me a while to figure out what they meant :-)

Bart

Fran Carango just bought a EXR-5.....
I cant wait for his review....won't be long..