It isn’t possible (afaik) to swap parts into a style you’re building any easier than before, but what being able to play two styles at the same time brings to the party is the ability to preview the process.

I'm in exactly this place right now.

I have both the T5 and a PSRS970. I've never bveen able to get the T5 road ready enough as far as how I want/need it to sound. I found setting up the board after purchase to be complicated and after months of working on I gave up.

OTOH, I've loved playing the S970 which was a breeze setting up and sounds fantastic live.

Now, to the thread's main question...I've had the S970 long enough and put a LOT of live gig miles on it that accessing replacement parts is an issue. At 8 years old, should something major die on me, the board might be disposable.

Pi0cking up a new PSRSX900/700 - with me being 62 and still- gigging 350+ times a year - would give me some peace or mind repair wise and we're not that far down the road from the psrS970 that the whole OS player interface would've changed that radically yet...

Yeah… Yamaha have always made the transition from one model to the next as painless as the procedure gets. No, not always seamless, but generally far less traumatic than Korg or Roland did.

I certainly didn’t hear an awful lot of grumbling from 970 users when the SX appeared. Certainly nothing close to the tsunami of chaos that erupted after the PA5x appeared!

I’m just lucky… Roland are out of the game, their last high end arranger is a total gigging gem (for me), I have two so backup is assured, and there’s nothing else that ticks all its boxes. Yes, there’s some nice new features just starting to come out, but none of them are housed in a 20 lbs keyboard with a 76, and cost about $2300 (remember, the BK9 was nearly $2k less than the G70 when it launched!).

So, gearlust on hold, probably indefinitely! 😂🎹

Bill, no worries about parts - they will likely be available long after you retire. I can still get parts for my S-950 and my son was able to get parts for the PSR-3000 I gave him.

Good luck,

Gary

That’s an understatement Diki, the place is toxic. Some stirring the pot of discontent, don’t even own one. Probably don’t even intend on buying one even if there weren’t problems.
Some are under the impression “top end “arrangers are out there in bucket loads. As far as I’m aware there’s only 3 left , Ketron, Korg, and Yamaha . Some think Roland will come to the rescue ( for your sake that would be great, ) somehow don’t think so? Not sure if any of them currently meet all the expectations of some users.
It is a mess for some.
Feel safe to say it here, I’m enjoying mine. The bugs are really annoying because they should have been fixed in the Dec. update.
I work my way around them.
The ones complaining about missing functions, well, I read the manual before I bought mine, so I knew what I was getting and what I wasn’t.
They’re planning on adding a lot of the prior functions back, going to take time. The Pa4x evolved from the i3 back in the mid 90’s.
They goofed up by calling it a PA5x, should have given it a different name , new operating system, new name. Name sort of implied it was a continuation of the pa4x.

In fairness, Rikki, the PA5x is not a completely ground up, utterly new product. Some of the hardware has been seriously revamped, but the underlying OS is very MUCH a continuation of everything Korg has done for decades. It’s just horribly bugged and massively incomplete.

But once the missing stuff is added, and the bugs addressed, there’s very little from workflow to editing screens that will make a PA4X player have the slightest problem adapting. Certainly no more than the PA3-PA4 change did. I think you are being a bit forgiving to Korg. But then again, not being dependent on data migration and being able to immediately gig on your very expensive purchase puts you in a small field of users that can AFFORD to give Korg all the time it wants. Others are not so lucky, and nothing makes them madder than trying to take the heat from off Korg’s feet!

Hi Diki, only what some others have said, new operating system. If it’s in regards to style structure, definitely not new. Way one picks styles , that’s new. Other stuff works differently too. So I don’t know what qualifies something as new. Maybe just an excuse.
Yes, personally I have the time to wait for bugs to get sorted, there’s others in my situation too, home players,they’re just happy playing a great sounding keyboard.
I do feel sorry for the pro’s who use it for gigging. Songbook function isn’t working correctly, that was a bug that was supposed to be fixed last update. It’s the ones that have built up libraries of sampled sounds and styles and pads etc that have every right to be angry. Some would have been putting resources together for years..
I’ve got my style library , but I was fortunate, all my Pa4x converted ok, I never used sampled sounds.
Korg sure have made a hash of things. I tell anybody who asks to wait for the next update if they’re considering buying.
If I needed a keyboard for work, I wouldn’t replace what I’ve got with something brand new on the market, don’t think it even had a manual. That’s where the PA5x name must have given those early buyers false security.
Supposedly 3 to 4 months till next big update when they supposedly add a heap of functions back in.
Think they’d get more kudos if they did something earlier and fixed the bugs that were supposed to be fixed in last update.

Hope it’s not going to be the end of an era like with your beloved Roland, top of the line arrangers ,not worth the hassle or for whatever reason it was Roland stopped developing them.

Haven’t heard anything on replacement for Genos either? not that I probably would have bought one. At approx. half the price I’ve got my brilliant sx900. Asked the question on psr forum if Genos “styles “sounded way superior to Sx900 styles, majority of users said no, except that Genos has the revo drums and sa sounds and extra fx. ( talking about styles) not keybed or anything else.

Anyway going to be a long 3 months for many.

Hate to say it, but I don’t see the PA5 ready for pro use (if one is a pro that uses samples, the Songbook, the MIDI to Style converter and all the other missing or bugged stuff) for at least a year. Look how long it took Korg to address some of the PA4’s shortcomings, and that actually DID have all the aforementioned stuff working!

Now naturally, I’m sure that Covid, the economy collapse, the chip supply chain disruptions and a host of other factors played significantly into this debacle, but the fact is, Korg had a highly regarded fully professional arranger already out there, and next to no competition amongst power users (Yamaha wasn’t luring many away from Korg with the Genos), and to be quite frank, a few OS updates and a slew of new factory styles would have kept the faithful in line for a couple more years.

Rushing out a half finished massively buggy new TOTL arranger completely incapable of being used professionally only succeeded in making their competitors more viable for those wanting fresh meat.

I can only imagine how tough for Korg the Covid years became, and how hard the economic downturn hit their bottom line, but their overall corporate health seemed okay, the synth lines etc. we’re still selling well. To torpedo the arranger division before they had a good product ready to go, well, that’s how Roland screwed the pooch and decided to get the hell out of the segment..!

Hopefully not Korg’s intention, but they DO seem to be following the same blundering path… 🎹

Hi Diki, yep me too, wonder why they changed it. A few new features. Few new styles. Lot of us would have been happy enough. Might not entice most Pa4x owners to upgrade, but pa3x and older , likely to do so because they’re ageing .
My pa800 passed quietly away 3 years ago, 😇 (truth be known I wasn’t going to replace the screen for the second time at a cost of $800 aud. and this time round an extra $400 for shipping).
Anyway, I’m off to play, without all these functions to distract me, I’m actually playing music instead of converting styles I don’t need. Took me a while to work out it’s easier to just turn on the Yamaha keyboard instead of converting Yamaha styles across to the Korg . Haha.
Great chatting.

Hi ,
I find pads a great way of auditioning and changing styles. Korg has a great function style to pad/ pad to style. Simple method of making pads, choose style, choose the track you want to turn into a pad. Save it. Just say it’s a guitar loop, you can now try it with any style, just mute the guitar part in the style , trigger the pad instead. If it works , you can then use the pad to style function , to replace the existing guitar track.
Basically you put together a bit of a pad library. Bass, guitar, piano?

When I first got my sx900 I started to put together piano pad library. Not as easy to do the above for yamaha, pads had to be done in a Daw, but got some great results trying different piano patterns in styles. Just had to keep track of which pad belonged to which style, then I just had to copy the track from one style to the other.
Some of those Freestyle’s (FS) sound great with a piano track. Defeats the purpose, but sounds good.
Yes you can always just use the pad itself, but Korg doesn’t have the sync start function button that Yamaha does , not easy pressing the pad button to start exactly at the first beat. Piano arpeggio not great starting on next beat. You want it starting on the C not the E.

Whoops at it again,supposed to be playing, I think it’s one function that does still work on PA5x , even if not maybe not totally bug free. Have tried it.