Taike and Lee
I love Electones. I used to play a C-55 Electone when I was 11 and learned the Electone method. By the 90’s I bought my first Workstation because the music store where organs were sold closed. But synths were a different thing and after getting married in 1995 I stopped playing keyboards… until 2006 when I bought my first arranger a Psr 1500. I couldn’t believe what heard, I was astonished and sometimes I even cried while I played. In Spanish (at least in my country) there’s not a single word to describe an “arranger” and it’s still called an “organ”; even Yamaha call them in Spanish “arreglistas de canciones” something like “song composer”.
In 2007 I fulfilled a dream I had when I was a teen buying the old Electone D 85 that I couldn’t buy by that time and I realized that I really loved organs rather than single keyboard instruments so I started the search for a modern organ in my country. The search was useless, I only found a used HS 8 from 1987 at Us$ 2000 and I discovered double manual organs had virtually disappeared over these lands. Importing one here would mean more than doubling its price ranging about Us$ 20.000 so I finally decided to make my own Electone. I started adding a pedalboard, later a lower keyboard and when I decided to change the lower manual for a better touch sensitive controller I found out that it would fit better adding it as a third manual. The final set up consisted of a three manual organ with 2 arrangers a WS a NanoKontrol and the controversial Mediastation. After getting all this for much less than the cost of a Stagea in my country I think I will never go back to an Electone.
As far as I know a YouTube friend from Japan told me that arrangers are not sold there as well as Stageas are not sold in North and South America. He also told me he bought a Stagea (not the TOTL one) for only Us$ 5000. So I think Yamaha has different products for different countries because one of them could affect the sales of the other in the same country. I wish I could play and compare a Stagea and a Tyros side by side but from the demos I watched I can’t tell the sound quality difference between them. I have also read some sections of the Stagea Owners Manual and almost everything is the same: the 8 part style, the custom ABC (playing independent bass lines from the lower hand chord played) and the registrations (actually the arrangers registrations have more features). In the organ you can layer more sounds for each manual and you can program automatic registration changes.
Of course it’s better an integrated system than the homemade organ unless you are skilled manipulating iron and plastic and take the risk of disassembling your arranger but apart from the aesthetic considerations in my homemade organ the biggest challenge is to coordinate the registration changes or note transposition in the keyboards altogether. That problem would not exist if you only had one arranger. In relation to sound quality taking the demos on the Internet made by the manufacturer I could say the arranger sounds better to my ears. Just think the Stagea is from 2004 and the Tyros 3 from 2008. The organ has no SA voices and I don’t know about the Mega, however it has other VA voices (at least the Va Breath Sax in the demo in min 3:42 is awful).
To make it short why don’t you listen to the official demos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpxtlCLwWvA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq9_HWOpE4s&feature=channel A final note: if the Stagea had been available at an affordable price in my country I would have bought one and I would have never got involved in this forum
Victor
[This message has been edited by vagro (edited 03-22-2010).]
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