If I make it till Christmas, maybe Santa will buy both of us a new Genos.

Gary

Only reason I would consider having one is because I don't move my gear except very rarely. Although the weight isn't bad, it is still long. I'd have to change stands and rearrange the bandstand, but that's no problem. I'd have to lower a second row seat in my Expedition when transporting it!
BTW it is a beautiful keyboard, and looks quite professional. As it should!

Uh oh!



chas

No way Chas, unless you pay for it!

Don,

Thanks for the review.

What did you think of the "groove" factor as compared to the Pa4x? Do you think it is soniclly better than the Pa4x?

Al

Yamaha has some fantastic lead sounds. I found great guitars, new Pianos and Trumpets were good. Drums not as good to my ears as PA4X. I like organs on the 4x better, especially the way the lelie sim works. I'd say it is really close. I like the sound of both.
As far as the groove, not sure exactly what you mean, but I'm assuming it's a "live" sound. The variations in the Revo drums does add some feel to the styles. It's not anything I was missing on the Korg, but way better than PSR. For example each time a snare is hit, there is a SLIGHTLY different feel because the Genos varies the place it was hit on the snare. Pretty neat!
I couldn't really tell much difference in the styles from the PSR, but I didn't have them side by side. I do have several of the Genos style on the PSR and I didn't notice much, if any, difference in the way they sound.
Bear in mind this was still a fairly limited session and I didn't explore everything.
Only e.q. I did was to boost the last two bands on the high end from the FLAT preset. I tried all the Presets and that sounded best to me, through Don's two Bose Compacts.
It seems to me they are leaving a lot of things to adjust by the user, but I suppose that's not all bad because it's easy to do.
I would have to change at least the volume on almost every OTS button.
I do like that the programmable sliders are labeled and it is quite easy to adjust volumes and style part volumes on the fly. In almost every style, I had to raise the RH volume to 127 (full) for it to be heard properly. Default on everything was 100, but if I left the RH level there it was too soft.
Bear in mind that these are all minor things and can be readily and easily changed and saved to Registration, or even to User Styles.

Many years ago, Yamaha had the same volume Style to OTS ratio problem, which was easily corrected by just lowering the style volume to about 75, then raising the keyboard's master volume control a bit, which took care of the offset. Can't believe they would allow this to happen again. Someone just blew it, but it can all be corrected with an OS update if it gets to their attention.

Good luck,

Gary

Thanks for reply Don!!

@Gary, didn't Joe Waters release a piece of software to fix the OTS volume issue, or am I hallucinating again?

Not that I know of.

However, I did get to place my hands on a Genos yesterday at the local music store - AWESOME!

As DonM stated, there is a disparity with the Style/OTS ratio, but the owner corrected his with his registrations. Very easy solution.

I absolutely was amazed at how much the pianos improved over the T4, and the guitars were absolutely superb. I only had about a hour to play with it, but I was really impressed by the overall sound. It is the best arranger keyboard that Yamaha has ever produced, by far.

Now, if I sell the boat, which I hope to do before I die, I'll buy one, for sure.

All the best,

Gary

I love your enthusiasm, DonM and Gary. I have troubles with mine :-)

It takes me just two hours to get to Moscow where there’s a music store, but last time I was there I had some feeling like “what am I doing here?”. But in the same time people remark that Genos is indeed like refreshment, so maybe I felt like that for real reasons (maybe there wasn’t anything to get excited about). I see that Zuki is also looking for refreshment when he’s trying new Korg keyboards and it turns out to be not that simple.

As for me, somehow I regained some inspiration with my old PSR-S950. The funny thing is that now I’m using “GrandPiano” voice, which is quite old (PSR-S950 comes with a newer “ConcertGrand” voice). I thought that after playing this “GrandPiano” on PSR-3000 for several years I’m bored to death with it, but now after playing “ConcertGrand” for 5 years this dated “GrandPiano” sounds fresh again.

I guess there’re two realities we all are dealing with… One of these realities is what we call “real”, when we face some challenges, have some priorities, deal with people around us. The second reality is considered to be an idealistic one; this is our thoughts and dreams, but since that we have to deal with it all the time as well, it’s also reality, not just an optional thing. Speaking in this context of keyboards of course we should be happy with what we have. But in a dreamy way I just want something different from what is on the market right now. I want it to be sort of… “airy”… I want it to be light, with a white case, for a reasonable price. Because in this world of iPhones it is no longer seems okay to be large, heavy, with a gloomy appearance and to cost 5K. See how I’m going unreasonable!..

What I think is that we shouldn’t become prisoners of our instruments. It means, that they should be actually portable, movable, and also financially friendly. If I had to choose a keyboard right now, I’d think of PSR-S670. I prefer to believe that any resources are usable when they are manageable.

Even when it comes to playing an arranger keyboard… When you want to try an accompaniment. What people usually do not do? They do not mute all the parts. Instead, they listen to all parts altogether. It’s too much! And when all parts are on and then a player tries all the OST within 30 seconds…. This is how a keyboard starts to sound cheap, even if it’s Genos!.. But minimalism is not really popular so far. There’s some association between “to have it all” and to feel secure. Okay, enough for now! Thanks!