That's great, Fran. Let's hope yours wound up in the hands of a musician.

And a right back at you.

chas

Chas I remember when Fran bought 27 Farfisa G7's on a closeout. Great deal on some very unique arranger keyboards

Okay, you got me.

chas

Chas,

I'm mystified why the G7 would not have awesome Organ sounds. Doesn't it use the COSM modeling found in the VK series boards/modules?? Those sounds are awesome as I have the VK8m and that comes pretty darn close to sounding authentic to my ears.

I had the Korg M3 for about a month, so if you have any questions on that, let me know. However, Korg did release a huge OS release for the M3 after I returned it which introduced a TON of new programs/combi's. I actually loved the M3 from a Synth perspective, but I couldn't fall in love with the piano's no matter how much I tweaked them. I was very surprised by the Pa2xpro's pianos which are much better IMHO than the M3??? Go figure?? The bread and butter sounds are very important to me as I'm sure they are with you, on any workstation purchase I make. The M3 has some wicked sounds and Karma is amazing. Does the Roland have anything like Karma on it?

Al

I don't think the Fantom G uses any Cosm effects on the Organs. I agree with all of you that the Organs on the Fantom G are not the best, to put it mildly.

The Fantom G series do have expandability (unlike the Motif XS on the other hand). The "new" ARX expansion boards increase the sound palette as well as providing much greater tweakability to individual sounds on the ARX card itself. There are two out now i.e. ARX-01(Drums) & ARX-02 (EP's). Roland recently announced the soon release of new ARX cards, possibly at Winter NAMM 2009. Maybe one of them will be an ARX Organ card, eh?

Yeah chas, I have the 'other' Fantom G7 on the forum. I've had mine since late May when I knew for sure that Roland would provide an update to the original factory shipped OS (which was buggy and lacked some necessary functionality - like multisampling for one).

Roland just released the newest OS update on November 6th. The new version is 1.20 and it added some neat stuff like better Sequencer functionality, bug fixes, and the ability to use "larger" USB Flash Drives i.e. (over 2GB in size). Plus with OS version 1.20 the RAM capacity has now doubled to 1GB instead of the 512MB that it was originally.

PS: Since the Fantom G is a 'true' "workstation" chas, you can fully "edit" the Organs to try and make them sound better if you wish. The easy solution is for Roland to provide an Organ ARX card though. We'll find out soon enough if the next and, soon to be released, batch of ARX cards includes one. That would be nice if they did.

Best,
Mike

Good golly Mike, $3k for a workstation, and it doesn't have COSM organs?? How much more do you have to spend to get your bread and butter sounds? I can see buying an ARX board to add World Drums or other "premium" sounds, but core sounds like Organ, Whurly, Rhodes, etc. should be part of the core sound set.

Agree?

Don't forget how much these new expansion cards are too... They're nearly double what the SRX boards went for.. These new cards are like $450!

If you got Roland gear that takes SRX.., start buying them up now

Al, Mike. Yeah, I have already done the OS update and ordered a 1G ram expansion. I can't explain their rationalization for the the organs but since I had a Nord C1 which covers all the organ variations I'm likely to use, I wasn't too concerned. Perhaps I should have been. From what I've heard so far, I would describe most of the bread-and-butter sounds as good to very good and synth sounds as outstanding. If I were going for the very best acoustic and bread-and-butter sounds, I would probably look elsewhere. That said, the board truly IS feature rich, with enormous sound potential but leans more towards a production workstation than a performance synth (in my opinion). I think the price represents the on-board sampling/sequencing/recording capabilities. You would need to carefully set up this board and know it thoroughly if you intended to use it as a gig (performance) board.

I had a tiny little grey GE mouse that I had used with a laptop which works well with this board but being so used to Korgs, I wouldn't mind having that backed up with a touch screen (yeah, I know there are two camps on that). Perfect for me.......TouchScreen backed up by 'knobs and buttons' all with 'mouse' capability.

The main reasons I got this board?

1. Currently, no Roland sounds except for the SonicCell.

2. I wanted to try some more modern, experimental music and wanted a good source of easy to retrieve, modern sounds coupled with a reasonably capable, easy to use, sampler.

3. I liked the overall 'sound' of the board, much like I always liked the sound of the old original Triton (which I still have and use).

4. I got sucked in by that (french) demo that you posted .

5. I was bored (aka the 'Donny' syndrome).

Oh well, back to the woodshed. This thing is complex. Looking for a tutorial DVD if you know of one. Wish I had Rikki's resolve, patience, curiosity, etc., at digging into the bowels of these things.

chas

Ha! At least I wasn't responsible for you buying this one

I understand there will be a DVD out sometime soon for the Fantom G series. In the meantime chas you can read some Fantom G Workshop.pdf compilations and also check out the Fantom G Experience website for some other cool tips and videos. Here is the roland website link for the workshops and link to the FG Experience site: Workshop and FG Experience

Psst! Al! I didn't pay 3 Grand for my G7.

Best,
Mike

PS: Click the Fantom G7 link and then click Support chas. >? The link I posted didn't link directly to the page I was hoping it would.

[This message has been edited by keybplayer (edited 11-14-2008).]